Middleware and identity

0KNOW — Group Theoretic Zero-knowledge Proofs (0KNOW)

Zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) systems help principals verify the veracity of a piece of information without sharing the data. The overall goal of 0KNOW is to develop a lightweight group-theoretic zero-knowledge proof (GT-ZKP) system that can be employed as a cryptographic primitive in many security protocols such as identification, authentication, or credential ownership. They are widely used to preserve confidentiality and ownership of data. GT-ZKP can be seen as a reusable building block for making the future internet trustworthy and secure. In 0KNOW, we will focus on NP group-theoretic problems and design GT-ZKP by finding an appropriate platform group based on the selected difficult problem considering its applicability in the post-quantum era and we will develop an open-source implementation of GT-ZKP.

>> Read more about 0KNOW

Autocrypt for Thunderbird — Make email encryption extremely simple

Autocrypt is a specification that provides guidance for e-mail clients on how to achieve a seamless user experience. It does so by transparently exchanging keys, almost entirely automating public key management. This reduces the UI to "single click for encryption". The project will create an extension for the Thunderbird e-mail client that brings this experience to its users. The goal is to provide a new extension with a streamlined user experience that requires as little user interaction as possible, without "poweruser" features and performing practical user testing to identify open pain points. The extension will be based on OpenPGP.js, since this can be packaged directly. This will simplify installation and maintenance a great deal.

>> Read more about Autocrypt for Thunderbird

Coko Docs — A modern, open source replacement for Google Docs and Drive

Coko Docs is an open source solution for storing and editing documents using Coko’s publishing technologies. It is the first part of an Open Suite, which will be integrated with professional Open Publishing products. Coko Docs will have a modern collaborative environment for creating, sharing and hosting files in various formats. We aim to build inclusive tools as powerful as Google Drive and Docs, our initial target audience ranges from individuals to small organisations. Our primary goal is an Open Source product with strong Privacy and Security protocols and elegant accessible design. We will utilize the NLnet funding for the first phase of development where we are adding collaborative editing to the integrated document editor, with offline support (for low-bandwidth scenario's).

>> Read more about Coko Docs

Connect by Name — Library for easy connection setup

Connect by Name will be a C library providing an interface that allows a software developer to setup internet connections from an application in the most private and secure manner using well-established and open standards. The interface provided to the software developer will be as simple as “Connect to a service on a domain name” and be flexible enough to fit with different programming paradigms and environments. The library will facilitate composability with other systems and will be extensible with future standards. Our goal is to lower the barrier for developing high-quality software and thereby improve the security and privacy of end users.

>> Read more about Connect by Name

Record Federation for Corteza Clouds — Data federation over ActivityPub

Corteza is a low code platform for building cloud-based web applications. This is typically for private, records-based management purposes (e.g. case management, insurance claims processing, public sector management applications, CRM, ERP), but the uses can also be public if required. It has a modular architecture and its data later, presentation layer and automation layer can each be treated individually. Corteza Record Federation makes innovative use of the ActivityPub standard to describe how content from the Corteza data layer can be broadcast across large federations of Corteza clouds. All data types, simple or compound, entire records and entire data models are supported.

Whether it be energy, finance, health, education or smart cities, many industries need to share complex data in real-time or near real-time, while preserving the digital sovereignty of a large number of disparate actors, protecting the privacy of user data and acknowledging the law of whichever territories in which they find themselves operating. Corteza Record Federation allows for the creation of private networks of decentralised “mini-clouds”, all self-hosted and controlled by their owners, where this data exchange can happen as efficiently and more effectively than on any single centralised cloud.

>> Read more about Record Federation for Corteza Clouds

CryptPad Auth — Implement external identity mechanisms to E2EE collaborative editor

CryptPad is a real-time collaboration environment that encrypts all user-generated content in users' browsers, making it illegible to the host of the service. In this project we'll develop optional extensions to the platform to provide additional layers of protection for such data by pursuing two broad strategies in parallel. For the first, we'll take a top-down approach to security through integration with identity provider services like LDAP or SSO, allowing organizations to apply centrally managed access control policies. For the second, more bottom-up approach, we'll offer tighter control of user accounts through various secondary authentication methods like app-based TOTP or email "magic-links". These new features will provide more choices for the protection of data stored in CryptPad, while also making the platform more approachable for conventional organizations by leveraging their existing points of trusted infrastructure.

>> Read more about CryptPad Auth

CryptoLyzer — Cryptographic settings analyzer library

CryptoLyzer is a cybersecurity tool that can analyze the cryptography-related settings of clients and servers in the case of several different protocols. The tool’s primary purpose is to support end users as well as system administrators, security engineers, auditors, etc., in their work by telling them the details of the currently applied setting and informing them about the potential weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

Unlike many other notable free software projects that focus on just one protocol family, CryptoLyzer wants to be as comprehensive as possible. On the one hand, users can analyze several cryptographic mechanisms (e.g., SSH, HTTP security headers, JA3 tag, and later OpenVPN), not just the most popular TLS protocol. On the other hand, it is possible to test both the standard and special or corner cases. Latter means the tool can test hardly supported, experimental, obsoleted, or even deprecated mechanisms or algorithms, which may carry significant risks. The project intends to learn from the existing projects and integrate their solutions to lower the barrier to good cryptographic settings making communication on private and public networks more secure.

>> Read more about CryptoLyzer

CryptPad — Real-time collaboration with client-side encryption

Cryptpad is a secure and encrypted open source collaboration platform. The CryptPad teams project will fund the development of a number of group-focused features to Cryptpad. We'll improve our current implementation of encrypted shared folders to display the permissions possessed by team members for different documents. The capacity to remove a member from a group is difficult in an encrypted system, as the knowledge of encryption keys cannot be taken away once given. We'll implement key-rotation protocols, and develop encrypted mailboxes to facilitate the delivery of new keys to authorized members. The same mailbox system will enable the development of notifications, allowing users to request additional permissions for documents, to invite new members to a group or session, or to inform friends that a document has been updated. Teams organize in many ways, and with the technical components available we'll focus on interfaces which support different modes of coordination, whether the team is hierarchical or self-organizing. Overall, we hope to make it so that the most intuitive way to collaborate is also the most secure.

>> Read more about CryptPad

GNU Guix - Cuirass — Continuous integration system for GNU Guix/Linux + Hurd

GNU Guix is a universal functional package manager and operating system which respects the freedom of computer users. The number of supported packages, almost 15.000 on 5 different architectures, is constantly increasing. With the recent efforts adding support for the GNU Hurd operating system, and the ongoing work to easily provide Guix System images for various boards, the need for a strong continuous integration system is critical.

This project aims to improve Cuirass, the GNU Guix continuous integration software to provide binary substitutes for every package or system image within the shortest time. This way, the user won't have to allocate important time and computation power resources into package building. The plan is to add to Cuirass an efficient offloading and work-balancing mechanism between build machines, an improved web interface allowing to monitor machine loads and other build related metrics. A user account section to setup customized monitoring dashboards and subscribe to build failures notifications will also be developed.

>> Read more about GNU Guix - Cuirass

Securing Internet protocols with DIDs — Bridge Decentralized Identifiers with standardised authorisation mechanisms

Many Internet protocols require authentication, e.g. when we check our email account with a username and password, when we authenticate to SSH hosts with public keys, or when we log in to websites using OpenID Connect.

Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) are a new type of identifier that have associated private keys and can be used for authentication purposes. DIDs are in practice mostly used for exchanging Verifiable Credentials (VCs) between Issuers, Holders, and Verifiers. However, on a more basic level, DIDs can also simply be used as a replacement for usernames/passwords or static public keys, to authenticate by proving control over one's DID. Unlike other identifiers such as usernames or domain names, DIDs do not require a central authority for creating and using them.

In this project, we will work on integrating DIDs with existing Internet protocols that require authentication by developing a new SASL mechanism. The idea is that for example you could log in to your SSH host, email account, IRC server, XMPP server, etc. using your DID, which can improve both usability and security.

>> Read more about Securing Internet protocols with DIDs

Distributed Private Trust — Decentralised trust and reputation system

The project "Distributed Private Trust" wants to develop a prototype for a trust and reputation system that does not rely on a centralized trusted party and provides users with more privacy than current systems. It uses secure multi-party computation to calculate aggregate ratings without having to reveal individual users ratings to any other party. The project also applies techniques from mechanism design to make the system robust to malicious behaviour of participants, for example by diminishing incentives to submit dishonest ratings.

>> Read more about Distributed Private Trust

dream2nix — Automate reproducible packaging for various language ecosystems

Dream2nix is part of the overal effort to create more technical assurances, transparency and robustness within the software supply chain. Dream2nix as a framework allows more open source projects to achieve reproducible builds easier, and helps to create an auditable toolchain across different technical dependencies. The ability to reproduce software builds is of major importance when it comes to verifying if a given binary is the product of a given source code. Reproducibility also increases the maintainability and reliability of small and large software deployments. The nix build system allows for such reproducibility even for complex software systems. dream2nix integrates existing well known programming language specific package managers like npm, yarn or cargo with the nix build system, which will allow many open source projects to benefit from nix' unique properties.

>> Read more about dream2nix

EGIL SCIM client — System for Cross-domain Identity Management

Managing student information in an effective, secure and GDPR compliant way is crucial for the digitalized school. EGIL is an open source client that facilitates the exchange of student information to external providers of study material or administrative services in a standardized way. It supports attributes based on SCIM (RFC 7642-7644) and extensions, it provides an interface to common directory services and supports federated solutions between a large number of school principals and service providers. This project will improve EGIL's federative capabilities, submit an Internet-Draft on the subject federated accounts provisioning, as well as providing a proof of concept for using SCIM as the standard for exchange of student information. This will eliminate the problems caused by using several different exchange protocols and formats between school principals and service providers.

>> Read more about EGIL SCIM client

The search for ethical Apps — Create custom, self-hostable app stores for Android(-like) OS-es

Once you own a smartphone, often you will want to install additional apps to add additional functionality. In some cases there isn't much choice, like when you as a citizen need to use digital services provided by your government and these are exclusively available through apps. Pre-configured vendor app stores such as the Google Play store and the Apple App store actually require you to agree to privacy-unfriendly terms of service and introduce tracking behaviour - even if you are only going to be installing ethical apps that themselves are open source and privacy-friendly. On top of that, these apps "warehouses" contain a confusing amount of lookalike and dishonest applications that take advantage of naive consumers. Sending users into an app jungle with hundreds of thousands of apps that often resemble each other, leaves users unprotected. In fact, in many cases the whole idea of a "store" doesn't make sense - like when an app is paid for by public funding.

So why not create alternative mechanisms, that give easy and convenient access to apps do not force citizens to sign contracts with commercial third parties. This project will created custom app distribution mechanisms based on F-Droid, allowing anyone to curate a set of applications and distribute these to users directly - without them having to sign away any rights to third parties.

>> Read more about The search for ethical Apps

FOSS Code Supply Chain Assurance — Mitigate attacks through software dependencies

It is of the utmost importance to ensure that FOSS packages from public repositories have not been tampered with by malicious actors. This type of compromise is described as an open source "supply chain attack" and these have been increasing significantly. This project is building a new system (which is FOSS itself) to help verify the integrity of deployed code packages and validate their origin with external data sources, with the potential to mitigate attacks on open source packages supply chains such as: detecting if a package in use is matching verified code by matching source and binaries exactly and approximately. Or detecting abnormal code changes that may be signs of malicious modifications and possible attacks on a package.

The key components of this open code and data solution are a Package and File Fingerprints Database, a Code Similarity and Changes Detection Engine, utilities to detect possibly malicious changes in upstream projects, and integration in build system(s). While existing approaches may require a tight control of the whole code supply chain, the approach of this project is designed for practical usage with limited changes to a build and CI/CD pipeline.

>> Read more about FOSS Code Supply Chain Assurance

GNU Name System — Authenticated naming system for the internet from GNU project

Today, the starting point of any discovery on the Internet is the Domain Name System (DNS). DNS suffers from security and privacy issues. The GNU project has developed the GNU Name System (GNS), a fully decentralized, privacy-preserving and end-to-end authenticated name resolution protocol. In this project, we will document the protocol on a bit-level (RFC-style) and create a second independent implementation against the specification. Furthermore, we will simplify the installation by providing proper packages that, when installed, automatically integrate the GNS logic into the operating system.

>> Read more about GNU Name System

A proof of concept of identity-based encryption — Make encryption simpler

The project aims to extend the existing attribute-based identity platform IRMA with easy-to-use encryption. The kind of encryption is called Identity-Based. Its main advantage is that key management is simple, so that encryption becomes easy to use, via a plugin to an email client (only Thunderbird in this proof of concept project). The plugin computes the public key of the recipient of a message, from some uniquely identifying attribute of the recipient (typically an email address, but phone number, or citizen registration number could work as well). The receiver of the message will have to prove, via IRMA, possession of the uniquely identifying attribute to some Trusted Third Party (TTP), which will then provide the corresponding private key. Within this project a working set-up will be built. Turning it into a widely usable product will require more work, in follow-up projects.

>> Read more about A proof of concept of identity-based encryption

IRMA made easy — Usability research into attribute based authentication

Authentication methods, like passwords, often involve a trade-off between usability and security. Secure passwords are a hassle to use, and easy-to-use passwords are often also easy to guess or to brute force. Clearly, there is a need for authentication methods that are both secure and user-friendly. The IRMA mobile app can fill this gap. It was originally developed with a strong focus on providing secure and privacy-friendly authentication. This project will focus on making IRMA easy to use for everyone. We will conduct a formal large-scale evaluation of IRMA that focuses on usability in general as well as on accessibility (i.e. for users with disabilities) in particular. By doing so, usability hindrances can be identified and improved, making IRMA user-friendly and accessible for users with the widest range of capabilities.

>> Read more about IRMA made easy

Icebreaker — Gemini centric viewpoint of coding issues and bug tracking

Modern software projects not only require source code repository management but also tools to plan projects and solve technical problems. Closed source solutions and online commercial services may be convenient, but create significant concerns around control, autonomy and privacy - and they skew discoverability. Icebreaker believes in decentralised approaches which keep the coding repo separate from the project management repo. In terms of cooperation and teamwork, this helps to encourage new, flexible and dynamic approaches. These expectations are solved through the minimalism of the Gemini protocol and its terse Markdown format, Gemtext. It is modern because it is easy to understand; accessible to interact with (whether as a consumer or a contributor); and treats privacy as a foremost priority.

Icebreaker's flagship project, gLean, provides building blocks for navigating and interpreting one or more Gemini content sources (with settings, rulesets, and regex magic). (Non core) modules provide output in alternative formats, including Kanban boards. Creators will control their issue trackers. Creators' terms. Creators' conditions. 'Off-the-shelf' solutions can't compete against gLean's tailored approaches. FOSS communities can choose workflows that match their technical requirements, while supporting autonomy and adhering to their ethical values.

>> Read more about Icebreaker

YunoHost and the Internet Cube — Solutions for DIY-ISP's and self-hosters

YunoHost is a free and open-source server distribution that provides a self-hosted alternative to commercial centralized services, and allows people to take back control over their data. Yunohost aims to make server administration accessible to the general public and ultimately make personal servers as common as desktop computers. Based on YunoHost, the Internet Cube project develops an affordable plug-and-play server that can be bought and easily deployed at home by the general public. In addition to its self-hosting capabilities, it provides a privacy-enhancing WiFi hotspot which protects its users from censorship and metadata leaks. And because it is low-power, it can be used even in remote and offline situations.

>> Read more about YunoHost and the Internet Cube

Keyoxide — Self-hostable identity proofs with bidirectional linking verification

How do you discover which other online accounts across different services and service providers actually belong to the same person? Keyoxide is a secure, privacy-friendly and decentralized platform to manage online identities, uncompromisingly driven by what the user herself wants to share.

Keyoxide is a new type of service to allow proving linked account ownership on a variety of platforms. Keyoxide levers existing and battle-tested cryptographic primitives. The goal is to give users more control over their online presence, independent from dominant internet actors - without in fact having to depend on any centralised services or third parties. The project will improve the usability of the current Keyoxide, and its emerging underlying technology (Decentralized OpenPGP Identity Proofs). More service providers will be added and additional tools to provide proofs will be developed, to create a smooth and easy onboarding process for less tech-savvy people.

>> Read more about Keyoxide

Private Key Operations for Keyoxide — Implement Private Key Store design in Keyoxide

Keyoxide is one of the open-source success stories when it comes to providing an alternative to the proprietary product (Keybase). The UI is straightforward so that the interaction with the site is available to all kinds of users. Unfortunately there is one critical part that differentiates Keyoxide from Keybase - no support for private key operations. Adding proofs requires a complex maze of command line invocations. This project will implement best of both worlds: simple, UI centric way of interaction without technical knowledge required and the strong security of Keyoxide.

>> Read more about Private Key Operations for Keyoxide

Keyoxide v2 — Add cryptographic signature based to Keyoxide

How do you discover which other online accounts across different services and service providers actually belong to the same person? Keyoxide is a secure, privacy-friendly and decentralized platform to manage online identities, uncompromisingly driven by what the user herself wants to share.

Keyoxide is a new type of service to allow proving linked account ownership on a variety of platforms. Keyoxide levers existing and battle-tested cryptographic primitives. The goal is to give users more control over their online presence, independent from dominant internet actors - without in fact having to depend on any centralised services or third parties. The project will build on top of the existing OpenPGP Identity Proofs to add other types of profiles based on various cryptographic signature mechanisms from a variety of new tools. To maintain linkable profiles, a new signature-hosting infrastructure needs to be designed and developed. Other improvements are aimed at safeguarding privacy and achieving plausible deniability.

>> Read more about Keyoxide v2

Improve Email Encryption in KMail — Adopt improvements in Email Encryption in KMail

The goal of this project is to make it more simple for inexperienced users to just use encrypted mails, at the click of a button. Autocrypt is a new method for email encryption, that needs nearly no user interaction. It performs the needed key exchange transparently in the background, and does key management automatically. Encrypted Headers is a protocol to send mail headers in the encrypted mail part. Traditional encryption methods leaked meta-data, which could be used for mass surveillance purposes. The result will be part of the KDEPIM codebase, so you don't have to install anything else than KMail to use these improvements.

>> Read more about Improve Email Encryption in KMail

ARPA2 LDAP Middleware — Privacy enhancing middleware

Some protocols are far better known than others. Everyone will recognise the HTTP protocol we use to transfer web pages. LDAP is not as well known, but it is also a key technology we use on a daily basis - in fact it shapes how most organisations are organised online. LDAP is a proven technology but can be cumbersome to work with, and as a result it has seen little innovation in recent years.

This project develops a number of innovatie middleware components from the ARPA2 project. This includes a privacy enhancing middleware for LDAP (LEAF), which allows to do attribute filtering and selectively transforming of LDAP; SteamWorks, which allows for responsive large scale configuration and trust delegation; and Lillydap, a library that can be used to easily add LDAP to any application. The project also delivers on (broad)er deployability of these building blocks, by providing tools for distropackaging the innovative solutions produced by the project.

>> Read more about ARPA2 LDAP Middleware

Distributed Trust for Web Servers — Establishing a Distributed Trust Authority

The M-Pin protocol, and its implementation in the Milagro project currently incubating at Apache, provides cryptographic security using a distributed trust model. In place of the single point of failure (and high-value target for social engineering attacks) of today's Certificate Authorities (CAs), cryptographic verification is assembled from two or more mutually independent authorities, all of which would need to be subverted at once to break security. This project helps bring distributed trust to the Web, by implementing M-Pin support via Milagro's libraries in leading Open Source web servers. This will pave the way both to a distributed trust alternative to monolithic CAs and browser trust lists, and to a distributed trust alternative to protocols such as OpenID for user identification.

>> Read more about Distributed Trust for Web Servers

MoboSearch — Providing an alternative view on the Android App ecosystem

Mobile phones play a major role in our society, yet they still suffer from severe limitations in how they handle apps. As a result, most people are unaware of the dangers of privacy leaks and are typically offered very constrained search capabilities within one single source of information, the app store. MoboSearch is a new search engine and information portal for apps, empowering users beyond the existing app stores. The system exposes privacy and security information, like app permissions, and gives users new easy and flexible search capabilities that allow to make an informed choice and to increase people's awareness. Openness and interoperability ensure that the system can offer and receive data, so to cooperatively enable a better and healthier app ecosystem.

>> Read more about MoboSearch

Namecoin: ZeroNet and Packaging — Make ZeroNet work with Namecoin

Namecoin provides a decentralized naming system and trust anchor. Its flagship use-case is a decentralized top-level domain (TLD) which is the cornerstone of a domain name system that is resistant to hijacking and censorship. Among other things, this provides a decentralized trust anchor for Public Key Infrastructure that does not require third party trust. It operates independent from the DNSSEC root trust chain, and can thus offer additional security under some circumstances. ZeroNet is a decentralized web-like network of peer-to-peer users, which provides an alternative to TOR hidden services. In the project, Zeronet will be adapted to support a local Namecoin client, and provide additional assurances such as a Host Header-like mechanism to protect users from spoofing. Namecoin will be used as a human-readable naming layer for Tor onion services and ZeroNet sites. This eliminates the user problem of pseudorandom, unmemorable website addresses for onion services and ZeroNet sites, which can facilitate phishing attacks.

>> Read more about Namecoin: ZeroNet and Packaging

Namecoin: Core Infrastructure — Alternative domain name system

Namecoin is a blockchain project that provides a decentralized naming system and trust anchor. Our flagship use-case is a decentralized top-level domain (TLD) which is the cornerstone of a domain name system that is resistant to hijacking and censorship. This project is meant to improve the security and usability of core components of Namecoin.

>> Read more about Namecoin: Core Infrastructure

Securing NixOS services with systemd —

NixOS, with the nix package manager, provides different services that can be installed and configured in a reproducible, declarative way. But how does one know whether software sticks to what it is supposed to do, and prevent a malicious application to spy on others?

Systemd provides users with ways to specify fine-grained sandboxing options for their running service, taking advantage of the Linux kernel's security facilities. This project will improve the default configuration of the services that are available in NixOS using systemd, so that users may deploy services without granting them too much trust: the services would only have access to the parts of the system they require. From a security point of view, this limits the attack surface of the system and improves a lot of defense in depth. This also means that services wouldn't be able to snoop on all of the user's system.

To gain long-term benefits from this project, we will develop automated tools to help with finding the right configuration for a given service, and we will write documentation to help people who will want to secure other services with their task.

>> Read more about Securing NixOS services with systemd

Nym Credentials — A decentralised solution for authentication

Nym Credentials provides open-source code for privacy-enhanced authentication and authorization in a decentralized environment. Today, when using "single-sign in" solutions, users hand over their personal data to third-party identity providers such as Facebook Connect and Sign-In with Google. Nym Credentials tackles this problem by allowing users to securely authenticate and transfer personal data (and proofs of private data) while maintaining privacy without a centralized identity provider. Each credential is cryptographically unlinkable between usages and multiple decentralized identity providers can verify this data. Open-source Nym credential libraries can be easily integrated into existing services, with a focus on federated and decentralized European environments.

>> Read more about Nym Credentials

Opaque Sphinx — Secure password-based authentication with Opaque/Sphinx

Opaque Sphinx is a project that aims to secure password-based authentication by deploying the state-of-the-art SPHINX and OPAQUE cryptographic protocols to eliminate almost all common attack vectors - such as weak guessable passwords, password reuse, phishing, password databases, offline dictionary attacks, database leaks - plaguing current solutions. These protocols provide the strongest available cryptographic properties with cryptographic proofs. The project intend to port its already existing free software SPHINX implementation - besides already existing support for Linux and Windows - to Android so it can also be used on smartphones.

>> Read more about Opaque Sphinx

Opaque Sphinx Server and Clients — Server and tools for modern authentication

Passwords are probably the most common way to remotely use private services, which makes them a major liability - humans on average find it very hard to memorize strong passwords. Luckily, passwords - or more particularly tools to work with passwords more safely - are evolving as well. SPHINX is a novel approach to password storage that is information theoretically secure. And unlike most online password managers, the user does not even have to trust the server. OPAQUE is a novel protocol that can be used to eliminate phishing as an attack vector when authenticating to servers. The combination of SPHINX and OPAQUE provides some very strong guarantees while still allowing users to only need to remember one or just a few passwords. This project will develop a SPHINX server in a safe, compiled language, with ample tests. It will also further develop and refine a protocol above SPHINX, handling creation, deletion, backup and changing of data. In addition it will add the OPAQUE protocol to various free software ecosystems such as PHP, java, nodejs, ruby, golang, erlang and rust, as well as to the two most used webservers: nginx and apache2.

>> Read more about Opaque Sphinx Server and Clients

OpenPGP Certificate Authority — Managing OpenPGP keys for communities and organisation

OpenPGP CA is a tool for managing OpenPGP keys within an organization. Its primary goal is to make it trivial for end users to authenticate the OpenPGP keys of users in their organization, and in adjacent organizations. In an OpenPGP CA-using organization, users delegate authentication to an in-house CA. This allows users to securely and seamlessly communicate via PGP-encrypted email without having to manually compare fingerprints, without having to understand OpenPGP keys or signatures, and without having to trust a third-party with potentially conflicting interests. This goal is achieved by shifting the authentication burden from individual users to an organization's administrator, and providing a tool that largely automates key creation, and signing as well as key dissemination. Importantly, because OpenPGP CA works within the existing OpenPGP framework, users do not need any new software to take advantage of OpenPGP CA's benefits; they can continue to use existing email clients and encryption plugins. Further, OpenPGP CA can co-exist with other authentication approaches, like traditional key signing workflows.

>> Read more about OpenPGP Certificate Authority

Improving OpenSSH's Authentication and PKI — Improving SSH Authentication with OpenPGP transitive trust

It would not be a stretch to say that ssh secures the Internet - it is the protocol most relied on to log into servers of any type. Yet, its authentication model is inflexible, rarely used properly, and inadequate. OpenPGP's transitive trust (aka "web of trust") mechanisms and revocation certificates can help to provided additional automated assurances. By publishing and certifying OpenPGP keys for servers, an ssh client may be able to automatically check whether an encrypted connection is not only encrypted, but also authenticated. Similarly, server administrators can automatically find the right public key for users. And when a server key or user key is compromised, using OpenPGP, it is straightforward to ensure that it won't be trusted: just publish a revocation certificate. This project will add OpenPGP support to OpenSSH to improve and simplify these workflows.

>> Read more about Improving OpenSSH's Authentication and PKI

Interoperable Certificate Store for OpenPGP — Standardisation effort for shared OpenPGP certificate storage

This project will build a public cert store for OpenPGP keys, with well defined data structures and access mechanisms to facilitate interoperability between OpenPGP implementations. It builds on pgp-cert.d, which stores certs, and has an API to access them. Beyond the common format and API, the project will also add Sequoia-specific indices, where standardization doesn't make sense. sq, Sequoia's command line tool, will be adapted to use the cert store. In addition the project aims to develop a privacy-preserving way to update the certs from keyservers.

>> Read more about Interoperable Certificate Store for OpenPGP

Hardening OpenPGP CA deployments — HSM support for OpenPGP key infrastructure

OpenPGP CA is a tool for managing and certifying OpenPGP keys in organizations. Today, the private key material of OpenPGP CA instances is stored and used locally. This project will add support for two hardened modes of operation: 1) Using a hardware-token OpenPGP Card) based key for the CA, and 2) Split OpenPGP CA deployments, in which critical operations are performed on a highly protected machine (e.g. air-gapped), while regular operation can take place conveniently on an online CA instance.

In addition the project will build an OpenPGP CA based tool for version control signing workflows (e.g. git), with a focus on providing a smooth user experience for signing with OpenPGP card devices.

>> Read more about Hardening OpenPGP CA deployments

Owncast — ActivityPub powered Livecasting

Owncast is a self-hosted, open source live streaming platform for people to easily host and manage their own live streams. It has become an increasingly popular option for many people to break away from the large centralized services. The project will add Fediverse (ActivityPub) integration in order to provide better means of discovery, increase engagement, and to have interoperability with other applications. The goal is for Owncast to become a fully fledged member of the Fediverse, focusing on people's streams being discovered with existing timelines and search indexes. This would allow people to for instance contribute comments directly from their own ActivityPub powered website or ActivityPub-powered link aggegators like Lemmy.

>> Read more about Owncast

Adding Web-of-Trust Support to PGPainless — Web-of-Trust specification support for Java

Reliable authentication of public key certificates is a hard requirement for strong and effective end-to-end encryption. The "Web-of-Trust" (WoT) serves as an example of a decentralized authentication mechanism for OpenPGP. While there are some existing implementations of the WoT in applications such as GnuPG, their algorithms are often poorly documented. As a result, WoT support in client applications is often missing or inadequate.

PGPainless is an easy-to-use, secure-by-default OpenPGP library for Java and Android. This project will extend PGPainless with an implementation of a recently published, new Web of Trust specification. The goal is to make the Web of Trust more interoperable and accessible to client applications, overall increasing the usability and ergonomics of OpenPGP for the end-user.

>> Read more about Adding Web-of-Trust Support to PGPainless

Peppol for the masses — Hybrid self-hosted e-invoicing with decentralized identities

Peppol is an EU-backed e-Invoicing network which uses a top-down certification infrastructure to establish trust between the sender and the receiver of an invoice. In the "Peppol for the Masses!" project, we will implement Peppol in PHP (so far only Java and C# implementations are available), and package its core components (the AS4 sender and the AS4 receiver) as a Nextcloud app, so that users of the popular Nextcloud personal cloud server can send and receive invoices over AS4 directly into their self-hosted server.

Due to the top-down nature of Peppol's trust infrastructure, it's not possible to self-host a node in the Peppol network unless you go through a reasonably heavy certification process. Therefore, we will extend our implementation with support for self-hosted identities, using the "WebID" identity pattern which was popularized by the Solid project. We will also develop a re-signing gateway which replaces the signature on an AS4-Direct invoice with a Peppol-certified signature. In a follow-up project, we will also host an instance of this re-signing gateway and make it available free of charge, similar to how the LetsEncrypt project has made TLS certificates available free of charge.

This project will lower the (cost) barrier for machine-readable cryptographically-signed e-Invoicing messages, and at the same time increase the sovereignty of end-users, towards a human-centric internet of business documents.

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Privacy Enhancements for PowerDNS and DNSdist — Make it easier to deploy private DoT/DoH resolvers

DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS (DoH) are two recent developments in the DNS field, and currently these are dominated by US based providers. The project will enhance the availability of open, trustworthy, privacy respecting DNS Resolvers in such a way that it allows any DNS provider, operator, or user to provide encrypted DNS service. This project aims to speed up implementation, improvement and standardisation of the most important Privacy enhancing features of DNSdist and PowerDNS resolvers to allow for the entire DNS-chain (from client, to caching-resolver, to authoritative nameserver) to be encrypted. The project will add support to the (open source) PowerDNS components (dnsdist, recursor and Authoritative server) for the privacy features necessary.

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Prosody IM — Implement SASL authentication mechanism for XMPP

XMPP is the most widely deployed standard protocol for real-time messaging today, and is a very popular choice among individuals and organizations who wish to manage their own internet communications, instead of submitting to other (e.g. commercial/data-driven) communication platforms. For an XMPP user to log in to their account today, two things are required: a username and a password. This has remained unchanged for many years, while other technologies have been steadily advancing to support security-enhancing features such as multi-factor authentication or even self-sovereign identities.

XMPP uses an authentication umbrella standard known as SASL to authenticate all connections.The way XMPP integrates SASL is defined in RFC 6120 and assumes a very simple challenge-response flow, which has worked well in allowing us to upgrade the network from older SASL mechanisms such as DIGEST-MD5 and onto more modern mechanisms such as SCRAM-SHA-1 and SCRAM-SHA-256.

To gain new authentication features beyond simple password authentication, we need to evolve XMPP’s relationship with SASL. This project will deliver just that, and will be the first complete implementation of a proposed standard (XEP-0388: Extensible SASL Profile) into the popular Prosody XMPP server. It will also implement support for per-session access control throughout Prosody, and support for XEP-0386 (Bind 2.0).

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Redwax — Standardisation of client side PKI interfaces

The internet was not designed as a public infrastructure and most of the engineering trade-offs of the lower-layer technologies have generally erred on the side of accommodating fast growth and ease rather than values such as security, confidentiality and privacy. Yet today the internet is everywhere from providing a place for democratic discourse to healthcare to finance and personal communication. Redwax aims to decentralise trust management so that the values security, confidentiality and privacy can be upheld in public infrastructure and private interactions. The overarching goal of Redwax is to strengthen the existing technologies and infrastructure by providing a modular and practical set of tools to manage public key based trust infrastructures as currently used. These tools capture and hard code a lot of industry best practice and specialist PKI knowledge so that they can be put into the hands of a much wider community than currently served by a few specialist industries. With this project the Redwax team hopes to help re-establish (and/or strengthen) the support for these non-centralized trust management technologies inside web browsers and other relevant applications by working with standards organizations and industry coordination groups, and to create the initial reference implementations for their standardisation.

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Robur private DNS resolver and DHCP server — Secure network configuration and DNS resolution

DHCP and DNS are fundamental Internet protocols, DHCP is used for dynamic IP address configuration in a local network, DNS for resolving hostnames to IP addresses. In this project, we develop a robust DHCP server and DNS resolver as a MirageOS unikernel. MirageOS unikernels are self-contained virtual machine images which are composed of the required OCaml libraries, leading to a binary with a minimal trusted code base, and thus minimized attack surface. The choice of the memory-safe, functional, and statically typed language OCaml avoids common attack vectors, such as buffer overflows and double frees. MirageOS unikernels can be deployed on various hypervisors (Xen, KVM, BHyve), microkernels (Genode, Muen), or as Unix binary (also with seccomp rules that allow only 10 system calls) on x86-64 and arm64. Several DHCP and DNS privacy extensions, extensive testing, and documentation is worked on to allow everyone to use it on their home router or in the data center. Migration of existing configuration (e.g. dnsmasq) to Robur DNS resolver and DHCP server will be provided as well.

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Rocket CWMP — Remote governance and configuration for internet equipment

CWMP (CPE WAN Management Protocol) or TR-069 is a technical specification of a Broadband Forum designed for remote governing of a CPE. CWMP is a standardized and widely-used text-based protocol enabling communication between CPE and Auto Configuration Server (ACS).

Rocket CWMP is a modular CWMP-client capable of supporting TR-069, TR-181 and other technical reports. The project was started out of an industry gap regarding a production-ready, FOSS solution that meets the ISP requirements and the feature and security requirements of modern embedded devices. It is capable of integrating into existing solutions for automatic and remote software installation or provisioning of CPEs. The client is designed to be easily portable to different Linux platforms (OpenWrt and other Linux distributions such as Yocto, Debian, Ubuntu and others). Its modularity implies that developers can easily build new features based on their requirements. It would serve as a light weight glue between CWMP and embedded Linux software standards for configuration and statistics.

The end goal of this project would be to create and FOSS delivering mandatory remote management features in ISP ecosystem. ISPs would finally be equipped with a CWMP client that: a) is an open and extendable replacement of the closed software alternatives, b) is designed to easily include and configure various backend systems and c) allows replacing proprietary firmware and leveraging Open Source components.

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SASL Works for the InternetWide Architecture — Integrate new authentication mechanisms into SASL

The SASL Works allow clients to use authentication mechanism that meet their requirements, and use it in virtually all protocols, which includes but is not limited to the web. Servers on the other hand, can flexibly adapt to clients from any domain, by backporting authentication inquiries to the client's own realm for the desired level of approval. Once configured, this process frees service providers from the need to manage user accounts and secure storage of credentials. Clients finally get a choice to use strong cryptographic authentication mechanisms instead of being forced to use a site programmer's poor approach to security. This in turn is helpful for setting higher levels of security policies in formal bodies such as organisations and governments, while generally simplifying the user interaction.

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SCION-RAINS — RAINS, Another Internet Naming Service (or, a DNS alternative)

The project summary for this project is not yet available. Please come back soon!

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Geographic tagging of Routing and Forwarding — Geographic tagging and discovery of Internet Routing and Forwarding

SCION is the first clean-slate Internet architecture designed to provide route control, failure isolation, and explicit trust information for end-to-end communication. As a path-based architecture, SCION end-hosts learn about available network path segments, and combine them into end-to-end paths, which are carried in packet headers. By design, SCION offers transparency to end hosts with respect to the path a packet travels through the network. This has numerous applications related to trust, compliance, and also privacy. By better understanding of the geographic and legislative context of a path, users can for instance choose trustworthy paths that best protect their privacy. Or avoid the need for privacy intrusive and expensive CDN's by selecting resources closer to them. SCION is the first to have such a decentralised system offer this kind of transparency and control to users of the network.

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A Secret Key Store for Sequoia PGP — Standards-compliant private key store for OpenPGP

This project implements a private key store for Sequoia, a new OpenPGP implementation. Currently, Sequoia-using programs use private keys directly. A private key store mediates applications' access to private keys, and offers three major advantages relative to the status quo. First, a private key store is in a separate address space. This means that private keys that are in memory are in a different address space from the application. This was underlying cause of the Heartbleed vulnerability. Second, a private key store can provide a uniform interface for accessing keys stored on different backends, e.g., an in-memory key, a key on a smart card, or a key on a remote computer, which is accessed via ssh. This simplifies applications. Third, this architecture simplifies sharing private key material among multiple applications. Only the private key store needs to worry about managing the private key material, which improves security. And, when a user unlocks a key in one application, it is potentially unlocked in all applications, which improves usability.

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Adding TPM Support to Sequoia PGP — Implement use of TPM 2.0 crypto hardware for OpenPGP

Protecting cryptographic keys is hard. If they are stored in a file, an attacker can exfiltrate them - even if the harddrive is encrypted at rest. A good practical solution is a hardware token like a Nitrokey, which stores keys and exposes a limited API to the host. For most end users, a token is a hassle: one needs to carry it around, it needs to be inserted, and it is not possible to work if it is left at home. And, it needs to be purchased. There is a better solution, which doesn't cost anything. A trusted computing module (TPM) is like an always-connected hardware token only more powerful (the keys can be bound to a particular OS installation, it can store nearly an unlimited number of keys, not just three) and TPMs are already present in most computers. This project will add support for TPMs to Sequoia PGP including comprehensive test suites and in-depth documentation for both software engineers: as an API and end-users as a way to use TPM bound keys through Sequoia's command-line interface (sq) for decryption and signing.

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Solid Application Interoperability —

Solid Application Interoperability specification details how Agents in the Solid ecosystem can read, write, and manage data stored in a Solid pod using disparate Applications, either individually or in collaboration with other Agents. Solid is a specification that lets people store their data securely in decentralized data stores called Pods. Pods are like secure personal web servers for data. When data is stored in someone's Pod, they control which people and applications can access it. Solid was initiated and is currently led by the inventor of the World Wide Web, sir Tim Berners-Lee. Solid Application Interoperability provides clear way to create intuitive data boundaries and higher level patterns to manage access to that data following the principle of least privilege. Specification is accompanied by a primer and sample implementations.

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Solid Wallet — Authorization reasoning, rule-based controls and fluid integration for Solid

Solid Apps display information collected by following linked data across the World Wide Web, writing changes to Solid Personal Online Data Stores (PODs). Following links can land an App on a protected resource somewhere on the Web, accessible only to a select group of actors specified in an associated Web Access Control Resource. Solid Wallet aims to build core libraries to reason over Solid Access Control Rules, limit access to what clients can request, publish keys and sign transactions. The same libraries will also be useable by servers to verify such claims. Finally, we will use these libraries to build a flexible prototype Wallet for Solid apps that run in the browser or server.

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Dual-level Specification Inference — Make formal verification more practical with dual-level Specification Inference

While formal verification of smart contracts gains traction, writing formal specifications can be equally if not more costly than writing code. Spec^2 is a specification inference framework that aims to automatically deduce a high-quality set of specs based on the code only. The inferred specs include both per-transaction pre-post conditions (low-level specs) and invariants on the blockchain-backed storage (high-level specs). Furthermore, the inferred specs should be similar to what experts might develop manually and can be easily examined by people without formal verification training. The funding from NLnet and NGI Assure will be used to prototype Spec^2 against the Move language and infer specifications for Move-based smart contracts.

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Statime PTP Master — Statime - Zero-allocation cross-platform Precision Time Protocol

High-precision clock synchronization is becoming increasingly important in application areas such as high precision localization, finance, broadcasting, security protocols, smart grids, and cellular base station transmissions. The Precision Time Protocol (PTP) is widely used for these critical applications and it is therefore important for it to be as secure and reliable as possible.

We have previously developed the first iteration of Statime, an implementation of a PTP slave in the Rust programming language. The outcome of that project is a secure-by-design implementation, leveraging the Rust borrow checker to guarantee memory-safety. With this project, we will expand our implementation in two ways. Firstly, we will expand the feature set to include a PTP master, conforming to the IEEE standard for PTP (the 2019 version, IEEE1588-2019), so we can run a full PTP instance with the memory-safety guarantees that our implementation provides.

Secondly, our implementation will be able to run without an operating system or system allocator. Those properties make the implementation inherently portable and more reliable. Our concrete goal for this second phase is that it runs on the stm32f7 microcontroller, a device with built-in PTP Ethernet support, but otherwise limited capabilities.

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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.

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Tvix — Alternative Rust-based software build transparency

Tvix is a modern design and implementation of the Nix package manager (GPLv3). It brings a modular architecture in which components such as the build environment or package store are replaceable, which enables new use-cases and platforms. A graph-reduction evaluation model will make it possible to use Nix for package definitions and entire system configurations, its proven and tested use case, as well as for granular build definitions for individual components of software. Tvix will be fully compatible with nixpkgs, the existing package definition set for Nix, letting its users leverage more than a decade of community contributions and making it useful right out-of-the-box.

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Universal DID Resolver and Registrar — Tooling for decentralized identifiers

The Universal DID Resolver and Registrar are open-source software components that implement Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs). DIDs lie at the heart of an emerging technical and social paradigm known as "self-sovereign identity" (SSI), which allows individuals, organizations, and things to create and manage their digital identities without dependence on any central authority or intermediary. This technology is highly aligned with Next Generation Internet values such as human-centricity, openness, trust, and reliability. DIDs as a building block for protocols are of similar importance to Internet infrastructure as other identifiers such as domain names or e-mail addresses. The Universal DID Resolver and Registrar are aligned with corresponding W3C community group specification efforts. Development and maintainance of the code takes place in close collaboration with relevant community and industry stakeholders such as the Decentralized Identity Foundation, uPort, Jolocom, Sovrin, Civic, Veres One, Blockstack, ERC725 Alliance, etc.

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XWiki — Bring wiki capabilities into the Fediverse

XWiki is a modern and extensible open source wiki platform. Up until now, XWiki had been focusing on providing the best collaboration experience and features to its users. We're now taking this to the next level by having XWiki be part of the larger federation of collaboration and social software (a.k.a. fediverse), thus allowing users to collaborate externally. XWiki is embracing the W3C ActivityPub specification. Specifically we're implementing the server part of the specification, to be able to both view activity and content happening in external services inside XWiki itself and to make XWiki's activity and content available from these other services too. A specific but crucial use case, is to allow content collaboration between different XWiki servers, sharing content and activity.

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ARPA2 resource ACL and HTTP SASL modules for NGINX — Extend consistent access control to NGINX webserver

In most of our daily interactions with a remote server we depend on the application running on the server to properly authenticate the user within the browser session, and to manage who can do what. However, if we want to enforce stronger guarantees with regards to restricted resources and tasks, our options are much more limited. This project from the ARPA2 community wants to move the state of the art in access control forward by combining the extensible SASL standard with a well-defined generic ACL mechanism that also allows for pseudonimity. The project will produce a self-contained library and two modules for a popular web server (NGINX) that use the new library. With the NGINX HTTP SASL module a user-agent can authenticate to the web server using any SASL mechanism the server supports. With the NGINX ARPA2 ACL module the web server can determine whether an authenticated user has authorization for the request that he/she sent. I.e. a user makes the request: "DELETE /messages/10" and the server can then decide based on the authenticated user, the action and resource whether this is allowed or not.

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Bitmask — User-friendly and secure VPN configuration

Bitmask is a Desktop and Android client designed to achieve a zero-configuration end-user experience for setting up a VPN that connects to a given set of providers - those that follow the LEAP platform specification. To do so, clients rely on providers exposing configuration files on well-known urls, according to their particular setup regarding the available VPN gateways and transports. This project aims at adding low-end routers a new extra platform that users can choose when installing BitmaskVPN. Running VPN software in a commonly available router, with hardware-based user interfaces, will greatly extend the target audience for Bitmask. To achieve this goal, a porting of the BitmaskVPN client will be done in nim, a statically typed language that generates small native and dependency-free executables, allowing the setup of the VPN with the switch of a hardware button. Finally, the resulting port will be packaged for OpenWRT, and build scripts will be made available for providers to offer to their users a ready-to-use flashing image for a selection of routers.

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Distributed Mechanism Learning — Privacy preserving ways of distributed data usage

Mechanism design is a field concerned with finding rules for economic processes which incentivize self-interested agents to behave in a way, such that a common goal is reached. This project aims to build robust infrastructure for mechanism design via machine learning, to make theoretical results more applicable to practical networked deployments. We plan to do this by finding solutions for the following two problems and making them accessible to developers, while keeping the required domain knowledge to a minimum:

On the one hand, a trusted third party is often assumed to exist, which is supposed to learn and execute the mechanism. In practice, finding neutral trusted parties who do not stand to gain anything from cheating can be hard. To solve this problem, we distribute the computation of the trusted party over multiple computers, ideally controlled by different entities, using multiparty computation. This way, we get a more robust trust base with better alignment of incentives.

On the other hand, current models often assume prior knowledge about preference distributions of agents to learn optimal mechanisms. In practice, this knowledge is not always available. We exchange finding optimal solutions using prior information with finding approximate solutions using no prior information, by way of differentially private learning. This results in more general applicability, especially in settings with sparse information.

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imap-codec library — Release version 1.0 of the imap-codec library

With an expected volume of 333 billion messages per day in 2022, email is one of today's most common methods to exchange information on the Internet. For better or worse, email is unlikely to go away soon, meaning that even the latest software needs to support it in a trustworthy and resilient way. imap-codec is a misuse-resistant IMAP parsing and serialization library focusing on correctness and security. It should pave the way for a new generation of email clients, servers, and utilities written in Rust and become a reusable building block for the Next Generation Internet. To archive that, it is essential to stabilize the API, improve testing, provide excellent documentation, and establish a welcoming and sustainable open-source environment for imap-codec.

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DNSSEC Key Signing Suite — A best practise for DNSSEC Key Signing

DNSSEC provides trust in the DNS by guaranteeing the authenticity and integrity of DNS responses. As DNS is of fundamental importance to most Internet communication, this is a vital function that needs safeguarding. Beyond providing trust in the DNS, DNSSEC is a key enabler for other technologies that improve the security, privacy and trust of Internet users. In the DNSSEC Key Signing Suite project we build a set of tools, scripts and guidelines (a playbook) to facilitate simple key signing with a standardised ceremony that has automated checks and audits where possible. The impact of this will be twofold. First, it leads to reliable, predictable and verifiable key ceremonies, which improves the trust in DNSSEC. Second, it will significantly ease the burden of operation, bringing the use of a validated and trustworthy signing procedure within reach for many more DNSSEC operators than today (e.g. smaller or less profitable top-level domain operators).

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