ValOS Cryptographic Content Security project
Cryptographic Content Security for ValOS
ValOS (Valaa Open System) is a project pushing programming to become a civic skill. It’s a decentralized software development architecture that empowers beginners with little training or prior experience to create practical web applications. ValOS applications and data are created, stored and distributed as event streams. ValOS Gateway is a JavaScript library that acts like a browser: it connects to event streams, reduces them into applications and provides means to induce new events. ValOS Cryptographic Content Security project focuses on enhancing the infrastructure level security of ValOS through event log hash chaining, end-to-end encryption and other features.
- The project's own website: https://valospace.org/
Why does this actually matter to end users?
Internet technology is perceived as rather complex, more than is probably necessary. That is why people tend to let other people be in control of the technology they use, even though noone knows what they need better than they do themselves. While there are millions of professional and amateur developers capable of creating applications on the web, that leaves billions that cannot. There is no technology currently well suited to bring development to the average person in the street. ValOS (Valaa Open System) aims to simplifies software development and makes web apps inherently more secure by default with no or little effort from developer,.
It does so by creating a much simpler model to work with. The content that the users create, and the application that enables them to do so, are brought together from different sources inside the browser - not before. The architecture of the system assumes the worst possible environment, because creating security and resilience when everybody is honest and connections are perfect is just unrealistic. No one should need to trust anyone else by default. Clients can and will crash at any moment, but the user expects her data back. Sessions can get lost and devices can lose connectivity, go offline without crashing, keep creating new commands into an outgoing queue and expect to survive coming back online.
ValOS aims to enable a new paradigm ecosystem where applications are secure by default with no or little effort from developer, further enabling the creativity of everyone. By design data can remain located securely in someones phone, under the direct control of the user. It aims to make the system robust in most imaginable scenarios and to allow it to fail securely in outlier cases. This is a highly experimental but visionary project with a lot of potential.
Run by Valaa Technologies Ltd
This project was funded through the NGI0 PET 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 825310.
