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.
L1: Trustworthy hardware and manufacturing
L2: Network infrastructure, P2P and VPN
L3: Software engineering
L4: Operating Systems, firmware and virtualisation
Szilárd Pfeiffer - CryptoLyzer
Internet protocols designed to be secure - such as TLS and SSH - suffer from implementation and configuration issues.
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
The gulf between users of cryptography and "hard-core cryptographers", resulting in complicated-to-use crypto applications or even insecure ones.
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.
L5: Measurement, monitoring, analysis and abuse handling
L6: Middleware and identity
Mark Burgess - Promise Theory
We tend to focus just on building whatever we feel like but don't think enough about the impact of these technologies on human society.
The project is part of a wide ranging effort to understand trust in network socio-technical systems.
Andrea D'Intino - Signroom
Privacy and security, more than ever! Document signatures work with 30-year-old standards (X.509) and most of the software available is closed source.
A web-based, mobile-friendly solution to offer signatures and verification of documents.
L7: Decentralised solutions
Esther Payne and Brett Sheffield - Librecast
The increasingly centralized nature of our unicast Internet makes us more vulnerable to surveillance and censorship and risks our privacy.
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.
L8: Data and AI
L9: Services + Applications
L10: Vertical use cases, Search, Community