Interviews with people building the Next Generation Internet

There are many issues with today's internet. In this interview series we asked free and open source developers about the issue that particularly bothers them and how their project addresses it. Each interview provides insight in a particular project and the people behind them. Taken together the interviews present an overview of issues with today's internet, and concrete answers to address those issues. to address it.

Ten technology layers of NGI

As a sorting mechanism, the interviews are mapped on the ten technology layers of NGI.

icon of chip L1: Trustworthy hardware and manufacturing

icon of connected nodes L2: Network infrastructure, P2P and VPN

icon for code L3: Software engineering

icon of terminal L4: Operating Systems, firmware and virtualisation

Szilárd Pfeiffer - CryptoLyzer

Issue
Internet protocols designed to be secure - such as TLS and SSH - suffer from implementation and configuration issues.

Project's answer
Cryptolyzer is a tool designed to support end users in choosing the right cryptographic settings in order to make communication on private and public networks more secure.

Michael Baentsch - oqsprovider

Issue
The gulf between users of cryptography and "hard-core cryptographers", resulting in complicated-to-use crypto applications or even insecure ones.

Project's answer
oqsprovider aims to be a technological bridge for one particular problem area in this space, namely the integration of post-quantum cryptography into the TLS and X.509 internet standard protocols with minimum change/introduction of new risks at maximum ease of use.

icon of ruler L5: Measurement, monitoring, analysis and abuse handling

icon of person L6: Middleware and identity

icon of decentralized network L7: Decentralised solutions

Esther Payne and Brett Sheffield - Librecast

Issue
The increasingly centralized nature of our unicast Internet makes us more vulnerable to surveillance and censorship and risks our privacy.

Project's answer
The Librecast Project is building the software required to rebuild our Internet using multicast, with privacy, accessibility, and efficiency as design goals from the outset.

icon of database L8: Data and AI