Rebooting the Web of Trust, Inc.

A 501(c)4 social benefit organization in the United States, Rebooting the Web of Trust gathers passionate professionals to define, explore, and advocate for decentralized identity. We hold workshops and salons where we discuss, collaboratively write, and ultimately publish ground-breaking papers and software to help shape the future of identity.

Decentralized identity allows individuals to directly manage how others recognize, remember, and respond to us. Instead of dependence on state- or corporate-issued IDs--acting as both root identifiers and reliable credentials--decentralized identity gives individuals a way to create and manage identitifiers that can be used to construct reliable identity on demand. Individuals use these identifiers to create and selectively disclose both self-asserted claims and credentials from trustworthy authorities, with any receiving party--without the unnecessary privacy risks found in legacy identity architectures. The goal is to define a privacy-centric and censorship-resistant identity architecture where no single entity can deny its use and well-known authorities like local governments and sovereign states can provide reliable attestations without revealing to those authorities when and where such attestations are used. Our goal is ubiquitous individual-controlled identity without ubiquitous surveillance.

This is a work in progress.

We are a volunteer-driven membership organization. We depend on the passion of professionals and the support of sponsors to realize our goals.