The Linux Foundation has announced a cross-industry coalition called the Trust over IP (ToIP) Foundation. ToIP was launched to enhance universal security and privacy protocols for consumers and businesses within the government, nonprofits and private sectors, and across finance, health care, and enterprise software.
As businesses struggle to protect and manage digital assets and data, the foundation will work to enable trustworthy exchange and verification of data between any two parties on the Internet.
“Without a global standard for how to ensure digital trust, these trends are bound to continue,” the Linux Foundation wrote in a post. “The ToIP Foundation will provide a robust, common standard that gives people and businesses the confidence that data is coming from a trusted source, allowing them to connect, interact and innovate at a speed and scale not possible today.”
The initiative will use digital identity models that leverage interoperable digital wallets and credentials and the new W3C Verifiable Credentials standard.
Initially, four working groups will be created including the Technical Stack Working Group and the Governance Stack Working Group, which will focus on building out their respective halves of the ToIP stack. Meanwhile, the Utility Foundry Working Group and the Ecosystem Foundry Working Group 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, according to the foundation.
“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, the executive director at the Linux Foundation. “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.“
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.
