Bibliographic Details
| Title: |
Trustchain -- Trustworthy Decentralised Public Key Infrastructure for Digital Credentials |
| Authors: |
Hobson, Tim, France, Lydia, Greenbury, Sam, Hare, Luke, Wochner, Pamela |
| Source: |
International Conference on AI and the Digital Economy (CADE 2023), 2023, pp. 31-40 |
| Publication Year: |
2023 |
| Collection: |
Computer Science |
| Subject Terms: |
Computer Science - Cryptography and Security |
| More Details: |
The sharing of public key information is central to the digital credential security model, but the existing Web PKI with its opaque Certification Authorities and synthetic attestations serves a very different purpose. We propose a new approach to decentralised public key infrastructure, designed for digital identity, in which connections between legal entities that are represented digitally correspond to genuine, pre-existing relationships between recognisable institutions. In this scenario, users can judge for themselves the level of trust they are willing to place in a given chain of attestations. Our proposal includes a novel mechanism for establishing a root of trust in a decentralised setting via independently-verifiable timestamping. We also present a reference implementation built on open networks, protocols and standards. The system has minimal setup costs and is freely available for any community to adopt as a digital public good.
Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, presented at the International Conference on AI and the Digital Economy (CADE 2023), Venice, Italy. Replaces the preprint version, with minor changes & additions based on reviewers' comments |
| Document Type: |
Working Paper |
| DOI: |
10.1049/icp.2023.2561 |
| Access URL: |
http://arxiv.org/abs/2305.08533 |
| Accession Number: |
edsarx.2305.08533 |
| Database: |
arXiv |
