Overview
Trust Over IP (ToIP) is an industry-led framework and set of specifications designed to establish a comprehensive architecture for Internet-scale digital trust. Hosted under the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust Foundation umbrella, ToIP brings together technical, legal, and governance perspectives to enable reliable, privacy-preserving, and interoperable digital interactions. The project focuses on producing concrete deliverables — architecture documents, protocol specifications, and design principles — that organizations can use to build systems for secure identity, credentials, and verifiable data exchange.
Core Capabilities
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Complete Technology Architecture: ToIP defines a multi-layered architecture that separates concerns across a stack combining cryptographic trust at the machine layer with policy, legal, and business trust at higher layers, enabling systems that are interoperable and auditable.
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Protocol Specifications: ToIP publishes open specifications such as the Trust Spanning Protocol and the Trust Registry Query Protocol, intended to function like the Internet Protocols for digital trust — providing standardized ways to issue, verify, discover, and govern trust artifacts and registries.
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Privacy-preserving Authentication and Authorization: ToIP advocates and designs systems that support passwordless authentication, selective disclosure, and minimal data exposure to reduce risk and improve user privacy while enabling robust authorization models.
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Verifiable Provenance and Supply Chain Claims: The framework supports verifiable origins for physical and digital goods, enabling provenance, ownership chains, and auditable histories using standardized containers and cryptographic assertions.
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Community Governance and Design Principles: ToIP supplies design principles and governance guidance to ensure that implementations are ethically aligned, legally accountable, and socially responsible, supporting long-term trust and adoption.
How ToIP Works
ToIP uses a layered model that explicitly maps technical components to legal and business constructs. The bottom layers address cryptographic keys, decentralized identifiers, and verifiable credentials. Middle layers handle protocols, registries, and discovery mechanisms for entities and claims. The top layers focus on legal agreements, governance frameworks, and business processes that establish human trust and liability. By separating these layers, ToIP allows implementers to adopt compatible technologies while tailoring governance and legal models to specific jurisdictions and sectors.
Use Cases
- Government and public services that require privacy-respecting identity and credential verification for citizens.
- Financial services and payments that need secure, auditable customer onboarding and regulatory compliance.
- Supply chain and product provenance scenarios where verifiable origins and chain-of-custody records improve transparency and trust.
- Health and education credentials where selective disclosure and long-lived verifiable evidence are essential.
Why Choose Trust Over IP
ToIP is valuable for organizations seeking a practical, interoperable approach to digital trust that goes beyond point solutions. It emphasizes standards, community-reviewed specifications, and governance models that help reduce fragmentation. By adopting ToIP components, implementers can leverage a common architecture that encourages vendor neutrality, enhances privacy, and supports regulatory compliance through auditable trails and well-defined policy layers.
Getting Involved
The ToIP community invites contributions from individuals and organizations through membership, public review periods, task forces, and open specification drafts. Implementers can review the public drafts (such as the ToIP Technology Architecture V1.0 and protocol implementer drafts), participate in task-force reviews, and contribute to reference implementations and interoperability testing.
Recommended Next Steps
Explore the interactive ToIP model and the Technology Architecture specification to understand how the layers map to your use case. Join the community or attend working group sessions to align your organization’s identity and credential efforts with the ToIP architecture, and consider participating in public reviews to help shape the standards and ensure interoperability across ecosystems.
