Indicio’s Trusted Digital Ecosystems answer President Biden’s call for “trust in the global digital ecosystem”
By James Schulte
The Biden administration, in coordination with 60 other countries, on Thursday unveiled a “Declaration for the Future of the Internet” that “reclaims the promise of the Internet in the face of the global opportunities and challenges presented by the 21st century.”
The declaration outlines principles and commitments to, among other things, “Promote trust in the global digital ecosystem, including through protection of privacy,” and it goes on to say the “United States and partners will work together to promote this vision and its principles globally, while respecting each other’s regulatory autonomy within our own jurisdictions and in accordance with our respective domestic laws and international legal obligations.”
President Biden’s request for a global digital ecosystem to reinforce safety as the world increasingly relies on an “open, free, global, interoperable, reliable, and secure Internet” isn’t far-fetched. It’s ready and accessible today through using decentralized identity and verifiable digital credentials to build Trusted Digital Ecosystems.
A Trusted Digital Ecosystem is a complete system for proving the authenticity of digital information in a privacy-preserving way; it can interoperate between countries, organizations, companies, people, and machines; and it is lightweight enough to slide over and sit on top of existing digital identity and access systems to add the verification, privacy, and security elements that are needed to interact with each other online in a trusted way.
Solving for Trust
The fundamental question Indicio has been working to answer for the past two years is: how can we trust digital data?
As the declaration notes, the problem of digital trust is now endemic to life because all our information is digital and we are (almost) all and always online. The very efficiency of digital communication has created an expensive, existential crisis—one costing us a fortune in mitigation, poor user experience, fraud, theft, and missed opportunity.
These problems have four dimensions:
One, Verification: How do you encode digital information with authenticity? Information must be able to show, definitively, that it came from the source it says it came from and that it hasn’t been altered.
Two, Regulation: Compliance and privacy laws have expanded to meet public and political concerns. They’re not going away. Digital identity and access systems must mitigate these risks to minimize their complexity and cost to business and organizations.
Three, Security: One trillion dollars. That’s the estimated cost of cyber insecurity. “Never trust, always verify” now defines the dominant paradigm in cybersecurity: zero-trust. Digital information must be continuously verified as authentic and unaltered.
Four, Resilience: A technology that solves all these problems cannot manifest in a single point of failure whether that is a single database or a single company.
Trusted Digital Ecosystems using decentralized identity technology solve all four problems.
One, Verification: Verifiable credentials anchored to a distributed ledger are able to definitively prove the source of information and that the information hasn’t been altered. They make data immediately actionable.
Two, Regulation: Verifiable credentials allow information to be held by the owner of the information and shared by consent and without the need for third party storage or management. Communications protocols are peer-to-peer. No more GDPR headaches.
Three, Security: Verifiable credentials make the continuous verification needed by zero trust security frictionless. Say goodbye to personal accounts, passwords, logins—all the broken machinery of centralized identity management.
Four, Resilience: Decentralized identifiers and distributed ledgers mean resilient systems. If centralized and federated identity systems go down, it’s like someone shut off the access equivalent to the power grid. Plus, all this technology is open source—it means constant reliability testing and constant, sustainable innovation. It’s also easy to integrate into existing systems and it’s easy to use because resilience also means making adoption and daily use as simple as possible.
Build Trust Now
We built out decentralized identity technology into Trusted Digital Ecosystems to meet customer needs. We specialize in solutions for finance, health, IoT, and travel. And, we’ve just closed an oversubscribed seed round. We’ve moved from solving the four problems to implementing solutions to scale.
The White House statement on the future of the internet isn’t a lofty goal for us; it’s what we’re building every day for companies and organizations.
The future is being made now—so why not tell us how we can make it work for you?
