Technology

TrustFinder is an application that gives researchers the ability to collaboratively enrich and evaluate information anywhere on the web, reducing inefficiencies and helping scale their individual impacts. TrustFinder is a reference application for what is known as a Verified Information Environment (VIE).

Verified Information Environments (VIEs) are a framework of open standards that support a new context communication layer for the inert data flows on the internet. They improve information quality using shared data schemas, standard data models and protocols, and governance mechanisms such as trust frameworks, rules, and compensating controls. VIEs also improve the ability to identify the source and provenance of information using digital signatures, cryptography, and biometric authentication factors such as genuine presence detection.  

TrustFinder and VIEs were created by a multi-disciplinary group of information system practitioners and researchers from the University of Washington, and the companies iProov and MATTR.

Verifiable credentials are data objects that help establish cryptographic trust between entities. Verifiable credentials can be used to represent everything from education qualifications, medical entitlements, identification documents, and more.

Annotation credentials are a specific kind of verifiable credential that is used to add meaningful context to data on the internet. Annotation credentials are based on a set of shared data schemas and ontologies which leverage JSON-LD and hashlinks or cryptographic hyperlinks to help establish provenance and information integrity for URLs on the web.

By building on open standards and leveraging tools to exchange meaningful information in a transparent and interoperable way, VIEs establish a common framework and protocol that creates a kind of universal knowledge apparatus and infrastructure. Annotations are shared and exchanged using open standards for verifiable credentials as well as protocols for exchanging and validating the integrity, source, and semantic meaning of any annotation.

VIEs leverage a variety of new technologies to establish confidence in the identities of its participants, including cryptographic digital signatures that securely bind verifiable data to user-controlled identifiers, levels of assurance expression to establish confidence in user interactions, and patterns for using biometric authentication technologies in a privacy-preserving manner, e.g. using secure biometric checks such as genuine presence testing tied to real world credentials to remove threat actors.

VIEs improve the ability to identify the source and provenance of information in a purpose-driven way. The standardized binding of structured annotations to data will enable people and communities to collaboratively enrich information at its source with signals such as insights, connections, and warnings, creating a chain of verifiable data that enables opportunities to gain a better understanding of the data’s impact and to be better informed by the data.