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TrustING

Ultrafast AS-level Public-Key Infrastructure

TrustING is a human-transparent and agile Trust Infrastructure for a Next-Generation Internet. This infrastructure enables any two entities to establish secret keys that can be used to encrypt and authenticate data. The foundation of TrustING is the AS-level Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) of the SCION Internet Architecture that provides sovereignty (ensuring absence of global kill switches), trust transparency, and algorithm agility, among others.

The TrustING service establishes symmetric keys with other domains in advance, and then relies on those keys to derive keys for local hosts. The core novelty of this approach is the ability to derive keys purely locally on both sides of the communication, without even requiring key transport. By making TrustING a control-plane mechanism offered by the network infrastructure, higher-level applications can make use of it without having to worry about complexities such as exchanging key material or establishing trust.

To show the viability of TrustING, we will implement TLS trust bootstrapping using TrustING and additionally demonstrate the efficiency of TrustING by using it to authenticate SCMP (SCION's equivalent of ICMP) messages.

Run by Anapaya Systems

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

This project was funded through the NGI Assure 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 957073.