Calls: Send in your ideas. Deadline December 1st, 2023.

Spritely

Capability based petname system

Users are currently caught between two worlds of identity solutions: prepackaged centralized identity silos (which also tend to be very phishing-vulnerable) and more decentralized naming systems that awkwardly separate the experience of secure connections from identity. What if instead users could have an experience where decentralized naming was a natural outgrowth of using the application? Spritely is a laboratory project to advance the decentralized social web founded by authors of the popular ActivityPub federated social web protocol. Spritely's approach to decentralized naming systems is to implement a "petnames system", where local meaning is given to "petnames" to otherwise non-human-meaningful decentralized identifiers (such as a hash of cryptographic key material). An important part of this design is that decentralized naming flows should be a natural part of use of the program.

Petnames tend to resemble local contacts in a "contact list", but petnames on their own do not provide a sufficient way to discover, meet, and come to trust new contacts. A complete petname system also provides "edge names": for example "CWebber=>JessicaTallon" would show JessicaTallon as an "edge name" proposed by the petname CWebber. Our system also provides support for contacts introduced in a context with no existing relationships; these are called "self-proposed names" and are rendered in a way distinct from petnames and edge names. This has been under-implemented in existing petname systems; since Spritely is implementing decentralized communication systems, this will be a full implementation of a petname system (including edge names and self-proposed names) in an ergonomic manner that can also be applied to other decentralized systems. In addition to a specification, the project will delivered a usable chat application plus contact list.

Logo NLnet: abstract logo of four people seen from above Logo NGI Zero: letterlogo shaped like a tag

This project was funded through the NGI0 Discovery Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 825322.

Navigate projects

Job openings : NLnet is looking for (junior or senior) technology assessors .


Currently open for proposals:

Want to help but no money to spend? Help us by protecting open source and its users.

.