Towards a TRUSTLESS Computing Certification Proposal v. 2.0

Today, we’ve invited selected speakers of the Free and Safe in Cyberspace event series, or a selected advisors of the TRUSTLESS Computing Initiative to join a tight-knit group of 5-9 people to devote 4-10 hours of your time, over the next 4 weeks, to jointly define – with equal decision making power! – the final text of a TRUSTLESS Computing Certification Proposal v. 2.0 (gdoc), a proposal for a new standardization and certification body for high-enough assurance for end-2-end IT services and for target lawful access systems, within current legislative and constitutional frameworks of at least some nations. It would also include some general some policy recommendations that would not essential to the societal impact of the proposed new certification, and related open target architectures. 

If you are a well-meaning, highly-competent and awesome person – like ourselves of course! – you may want to ask to the sub-committee or  contribute to the drafting process through as a member of a Consultive Group.

Such Proposal will provide the core of 3 extremely synergic aims and initiatives:

  1. Provide a coherent proposed answer to both Challenge A and B of the Free and Safe in Cyberspace event series, which can serve as a base of discussions for next FSC Editions, next in New York on June/July 2016. In fact, the first EU Edition sub-title was “The role of new high-assurance IT paradigms and certifications in delivering constitutionally– meaningful e-privacy and e-security to all, while preserving public safety and cyber-investigation capabilities”. 

    1. Constitute the basis a “full standardization plan” which will be one of the main outcomes of a 1M€ Trustless-based Coordination & Support Action (CSA) proposal, that we’ll submit  on April 12th Horizon 2020 DS-01 CSA: Assurance and Certification for Trustworthy and Secure ICT systems”. We’ve set up an initial draft of the proposal: PartB1-3 (gdoc) and PartB4-5 (gdoc). (we’ll also propose a 4M€ proposal to DS-01 RIA to build both the standard and an open target architecture, see our roadmap)

    2. Bring forth of our TRUSTLESS Computing Certification Campaign, centered on the related TRUSTLESS Socio-technical Paradigms (i.e. high-level conceptual standards). These have been bindingly agreed in a MoU ( to date by all the world-class participant to the TRUSTLESS 4-19M€ R&D project proposals, aimed to create a first open target architecture compliant to such standards, and which can be used to validate them.

    3. Work Notes:

      1. The document may want to go through a complete re-write, or re-framing, but I hope to have nailed some of the right content and framing. 

      2. The current draft refers to the “Lawful Hacking” paper as point of reference for high-level socio-technical components of a lawful access scheme with meaningful safeguards. Part of the work would be to expand upon it’s general recommendations.

      3. The current draft version is very similar to the version 1.0 from last July 2015,  which we presented as our OMC core proposal to FSC conference in Brussels, and was in a synthesised version the basis of day 2 panel.

      4. We’ll invite David Chaum to the US Edition of FSC, and possibly the drafting sub-committee, and possibly integrate some of the high-level ideas of its recently proposed cMix and PrivaTegrity proposal, which shares our general approach to the issues and is very complementary to our work (See this 2-page section (gdoc bookmark) of our submitted H2020 FET-Open Proposal).

      5. We may want to consider adding an addendum Backgrounder to the proposal to explain our proposal assumption, which could get inspiration from the FSC EU-Edition Backgrounder.

      6. We’ve set up a Google Group email list for general discussion, set on “daily digest” mode.

Rufo Guerreschi