Marcin Czenko

Society is becoming increasingly more aware of the importance of protecting digital information and it is becoming clear that the current centralized model has came to an end. The future of the Internet is distributed. Unsupervised, unmoderated access, affordable storage, data-replication, and security and privacy built-in are the most important aspects of the Internet of the future.

Unfortunately, a global, reliable, decentralized network cannot be built without actual physical nodes, as the opposite of thousands of nodes in centralized cloud data center. Only by building an open network of physical nodes we can pave our way as a society to the decentralized Internet of the future.

Identity Box is a personal P2P networking device giving you access to a global network of distributed storage, digital identity, and distributed personal apps. It is a community effort of building the next-generation, decentralized infrastructure that enables an open platform for privacy-preserving ecosystems.

Most of the data today belong to just a handful of companies. Personal documents, photographs, videos, things that we put online in general, contain lots of sensitive information. Information that we would rather prefer to stay private. Very often the same companies that provide more or less "complimentary" storage space for our disposal, also help us managing our whole digital existence. The combination of the data and the identity information is a powerful combination which empowers well-established business models where the user's data or the user itself become a product. Allowing sensitive data to be kept by well-known service providers makes it easier than ever for illegal institutions, but also the state, to gain insights into the data that they have no rights to access.

Our sensitive personal data are kept by the state, healthcare organizations, financial institutions, and corporations. We do not have control over these data and our access to them is limited. Every institution storing the data has not only its own policies, but also uses proprietary technologies to access the data. These data silos make interoperability hard and give institutions almost complete freedom to use the data without consent of the user.

Society is becoming increasingly more aware of the importance of protecting the digital content and it is becoming clear that the current centralized model has came to an end. The future of the Internet is distributed. Unsupervised, unmoderated access, affordable, unlimited storage, security and privacy built-in are the most important aspects of the Internet of the future.

Unfortunately, a global, reliable, decentralized network cannot be built without actual physical nodes, as the opposite of thousands of nodes in centralized cloud data centers. Users need to be re-introduced to the concept of decentralization and learn the advantages of technologies like self-sovereign identity, and content-addressable networks. Only by building an open network of physical nodes we pave our way as a society to the decentralized Internet of the future. Building the decentralized Internet of the future is therefore a community effort, where all participants become the actual owners of the distributed global infrastructure.

To support this community movement, we propose Identity Box: a personal P2P networking device giving you access to the global network of distributed storage, digital identity, and distributed personal apps.

Identity Box is a physical device, but at the same far more than just piece of hardware. Together with the included software and Identity App, Identity Box enables an ecosystem of rich, distributed personal applications. It supports IPFS, Self-Sovereign Identity, and end-to-end encrypted storage. And that's just the beginning.

Join us in building the decentralized Internet of the future!

We present Cogito, a mobile app that helps you remain in control of your identity. It supports a friendly way to identify yourself to websites, perform blockchain transactions and encryption. But most importantly, it guarantees that your identity is really owned by you. We believe this to be a good starting point for true privacy online.

Identity may seem like a boring topic. Haven't we solved the problem of how to identify ourselves to websites a hundred different ways? Isn't this a solved problem?

We argue that in order to guarantee true privacy it is essential to introduce new ways to identify ourselves.

We present Cogito, a mobile app that helps you remain in control of your identity. Use it to create multiple facets of your identity to separate for instance your working life from your personal life.

Traditionally, identities are bestowed on you by others. Your passport is issued to you by your government. Your bank account is given to you by a bank. Website credentials are given to you by the owner of the website.

These identities are ultimately not under your control. You get them on loan from the institutes that issue them, and they are free to retract them as they deem necessary. This is no basis for true control over your data. This is no basis for privacy.

With Cogito we've taken a cue from blockchains and PGP and use cryptographic identities. This involves generating a public-private key pair in which the public part is used as your identity (similar to a passport number or bank account number). The private key you keep to yourself because you can use it to prove that you are the owner of the identity.

These self-sovereign identities are created and maintained by their owners. They can not be taken away from them and are therefore completely under their control. We believe that this is a prerequisite for true privacy.

With Cogito we aim to make these self-sovereign identities very easy to use. Using a Cogito identity on a website is therefore as simple as scanning a QR code. Signing a blockchain transaction or decrypting data is as simple as pressing the 'accept' button.

In our FOSDEM session, we will demonstrate not only how Cogito works, but also what developers can do with Cogito. We will discuss the architecture, show the demo app and the tutorial. We invite those who are interested to help develop Cogito further.

Other people: Mark Spanbroek Stefan van den Oord