How technical assurances help make the Internet safer

Trust is the basis for social value and self-organisation, but technical assurances are what help make it trustworthy.

This sentence is the motto of the NGI Assure project, one of the NGI Research and Innovation actions that is aimed at ensuring trustworthiness across the Next Generation Internet. But, how can we make sure that those building blocks that make the Internet are to be trusted by humans? And more important, that they are designed to ensure the human integrity and privacy?

The NGI Assure initiative fosters the design and engineering of reusable building blocks for the Next Generation Internet that can be part of a complete, strong chain of assurances for all stakeholders regarding the source and integrity of identities, identifiers, data, cyberphysical systems, service components and processes. Besides complete solutions, the initiative constantly looks for contributions to deploy and validate those blocks in real world to turn them into reproducible and trustworthy end-to-end solutions that can withstand the hostile battle grounds of the modern Internet.

Examples of technical assurances

It already sounds good, but, how do those technical assurances look like when they are ready? Here are some examples of solutions resulting from NGI Assure, now available at the NGI Solutions online repository, with more than 500 human-centric innovations resulting from NGI-funded project.

• Cryptpad, an alternative to mainstream non open source workspaces made in Europe. Cryptpad is a collaboration suite end-to-end encrypted and open-source. It is built to enable collaboration while keeping data private. All content is encrypted and decrypted by your browser. This means documents, chats, and files are unreadable outside of the session where you are logged in. Even the service administrators do not have access to the user’s information.
• Tauri apps, trustworthy applications for the major desktop platforms. Tauri is a toolkit that helps developers make more trustworthy applications for the major desktop platforms – using virtually any frontend framework in existence. The core is built with Rust and the CLI leverages Node.js making Tauri a genuinely polyglot approach to creating and maintaining great apps.
• Neuropil, secure interactions for things. Neuropil facilitates the networking between individual cells. It is in this manner that the Neuropil layer, an open source solution, assures the stable communication between machines and applications. What makes it so unique is that the secure exchange of data between the IoT devices and applications is dynamic, decentralised, and fully automated.

Your idea can be next in line: Apply to NGI Assure

Until 2023, NGI Assure will distribute 5.6 million Euro in small to medium-size R&D grants towards R&D efforts and free and open source projects. That is why NGI Assure is constantly looking for deep tech components through its open calls. The 7th call is currently open for proposals until the 1st February. You only need to fill out a simple online form to explain your proposal and be the next beneficiary to help create an open, trustworthy and reliable Internet for all.

Apply to the NGI Assure open call here and get your idea funded with up 50 000 Euro and technical and business support.