Major new IT industry push to build common ID and security playing field

Perhaps this could be the good news we could all do with this week: a new consortium, the Trust over IP (ToIP) Foundation, has been set up with major cross-industry support to establish new, solid bases for Identity and Trust.

How: by promoting Digital Identity models that leverage interoperable digital wallets and credentials plus the new W3C Verifiable Credentials standard to address ID challenges and enable consumers, businesses and governments to better manage risk, improve digital trust and “protect all forms of Identity online”.

The group will be ‘hosted’ by The Linux Foundation, which frames yesterday’s announcement as government, nonprofit organisations and private sector players in finance, healthcare, enterprise software and more teaming up to “enhance universal security and privacy protocols for consumers and businesses in the digital era”.

“The ToIP Foundation has the promise to provide the digital trust layer that was missing in the original design of the Internet and to trigger a new era of human possibility,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at that group, which says it’s all about dedicated to building sustainable ecosystems around open source projects to accelerate technology development and industry adoption.

“The combination of open standards and protocols, pan-industry collaboration and our neutral governance structure will support this new category of digital identity and verifiable data exchange.”

You’re not going to be too surprised by the motivation as outlined in ToIP’s official launch statement: Businesses today are struggling to protect and manage digital assets and data, especially in an increasingly complex enterprise environment that includes the Internet of Things (IoT), Edge Computing, Artificial Intelligence and much more.

This is compounding the already low consumer confidence in the use of personal data, and slowing innovation on opportunities like digital identity and the adoption of new services that can support humanity, the group states – warning that, “Without a global standard for how to ensure digital trust, these trends are bound to continue.”

Founding Steering members include Accenture, BrightHive, Cloudocracy, Continuum Loop, CULedger, Dhiway, esatus, Evernym, Finicity, Futurewei Technologies, IBM Security, IdRamp, Lumedic, Mastercard, MITRE, the Province of British Columbia and SICPA, while contributing members include DIDx, GLEIF, The Human Colossus Foundation, iRespond, kiva.org, Marist College, Northern Block, R3, Secours.io, TNO and University of Arkansas.

“In today’s digital economy, businesses and consumers need a way to be certain that data being exchanged has been sent by the rightful owner and that it will be accepted as truth by the intended recipient,” noted Dan Gisolfi, CTO, Decentralized Identity, IBM Security.

“Many privacy focused innovations are now being developed to solve this challenge, but there is no ‘recipe book’ for the exchange of trusted data across multiple vendor solutions.

“The new Trust over IP Foundation marks an evolutionary step which goes beyond standards, specs and code, with the goal of creating a community-driven playbook for establishing ‘ecosystems of trust.’ IBM believes that the next wave of innovation in identity access management will be for credential issuers and verifiers to partake in these ecosystems, where trusted relationships are built upon cryptographic proofs.”

The ToIP Foundation will initially host four Working Groups, it has also revealed: a Technical Stack Working Group and the Governance Stack Working Group that will focus on building out and hardening the Technical and Governance halves of the ToIP stack, respectively, complemented by a Utility Foundry Working Group and the Ecosystem Foundry Working Group it hopes will serve as “communities of practice” for projects that wish to collaborate on the development of ToIP utility networks or entire ToIP digital trust ecosystems.

The ToIP Foundation will host an all-digital launch event tomorrow (May 7th, 2020) at 5pm our time that will feature a panel discussion, interoperability demonstration and live Q&A: Register now if you are interested (we certainly are!).