LIGHTest: An Open Global Ecosystem of Trust...

On the dusk of another day in Southern California, there are new TrustDecisions being made, that will impact how our IoT and Critical Infrastructure evolves in the decades ahead.  Operational Risk Management (ORM), will continuously adapt to our global future of "Achieving Digital Trust."

Yet, this innovative catalyst and consortium has been forming over the past year, from the European Union.  It is called LIGHTest.

"Lightweight Infrastructure for Global Heterogeneous Trust management in support of an open Ecosystem of Stakeholders and Trust scheme"

"This is achieved by reusing existing governance, organization, infrastructure, standards, software, community, and know-how of the existing Domain Name System, combined with new innovative building blocks. This approach allows an efficient global rollout of a solution that assists decision makers in their trust decisions. By integrating mobile identities into the scheme, LIGHTest also enables domain-specific assessments on Levels of Assurance for these identities."

Trustworthy computing is not new and it has been evolving since the beginning of the Internet with PKI.  What is encouraging and worth pursuing now, is a better understanding of the problem-set.

What is the real problem, that LIGHTest will address and try to solve?

"The DNS translates domain names that humans can remember into the numbers used by computers to look up destination on the Internet. It does it incrementally. Vulnerabilities in the DNS combined with technological advances have given attackers methods to hijack steps of the DNS lookup process.

They want to take control and direct users to their own deceptive Web sites for account and password collection to perpetuate their Internet disruption attacks and crime schemes. The only long-term solution to this vulnerability, is the end-to-end-deployment of a security protocol called DNS Security Extensions – or DNSSEC."

So what?

The Domain Name System (DNS) relies on these foundational entities for our Global Internet. Designated by letter, they are the operators of the root servers:

A) VeriSign Global Registry Services;
B) Information Sciences Institute at USC;
C) Cogent Communications;
D) University of Maryland;
E) NASA Ames Research Center;
F) Internet Systems Consortium Inc.;
G) U.S. DOD Network Information Center;
H) U.S. Army Research Lab;
I) Autonomica/NORDUnet, Sweden;
J) VeriSign Global Registry Services;
K) RIPE NCC, Netherlands;
L) ICANN;
M) WIDE Project, Japan.

Ref: http://www.root-servers.org

Now when you are just starting to understand the complexity of the problem that LIGHTest is attempting to solve, you add "Mobile Identities" to the dialogue.

It is one step towards trust to get machines to complete a transaction with integrity and consistent trustworthiness.  When you add the challenge of validating reputation and identities of people, the scale of the entire problem-set soars.  The geopolitical and organization boundaries that are now the state-of-play are tremendous.  The United States Department of Commerce is at the table.

Think about how far we have come in our technological history and enterprise architecture, with the pervasive use of communications satellites and 30 billion mobile devices by 2020, now imagine how far we still have to travel, to attain true "Digital Trust."  The infrastructure is global and the complexity is far greater than most humans can truly understand.  To trust one another, to trust transactions, to trust our machines and digital inventions implicitly.  That is our lofty aspiration.

LIGHTest is heading in an innovative direction, in the pursuit of greater trustworthiness and we have to keep reminding ourselves why:

Instilling fear in peoples minds about monetary losses, stolen intellectual property, hackers, cyber criminals and rogue web sites is important.  Buyer beware!  Stranger danger!  See something Say something.  WannaCry.  AlphaBay.  No different than wanted posters for bank robbers, fraudsters, or terrorists.

Companies, people, products or services that continue to serve up messages of digital fear, uncertainty and doubt, are in need of even more clarity and education.  The real problem-set to be solved is about trust and making more highly effective trust decisions, at increasing velocity...