DigiCert, a leading global provider of SSL and other public key infrastructure (PKI) solutions for securing web traffic and the Internet of Things (IoT), and the Sovrin Foundation, a private-sector international nonprofit, have announced the addition of DigiCert as a steward of the Sovrin Network.
As a steward, DigiCert will operate a validator node and contribute developer resources, helping to ensure the validity, accessibility and security of the distributed ledger at the heart of the foundation’s self-sovereign identity technology.
Self-sovereign identity refers to digital identity that is decentralised, secure, portable, private and completely trustworthy.
“At DigiCert, we have spent nearly two decades as a public certificate authority, and recently for connected devices, refining our processes and improving industry standards for providing scalable encryption and authentication,” said DigiCert Chief Technology Officer Dan Timpson. “Our initiative with the Sovrin Foundation builds upon that experience and provides real value in advancing reliable identity and trust for today’s and tomorrow’s connected technologies seeking to use blockchain.”
Timpson noted that DigiCert is also contributing developer resources to the open source Sovrin codebase, which is administered by Hyperledger as Project Indy. According to Timpson, DigiCert plans to lean on its extensive experience building large-scale PKI-based authentication systems to improve the security of the data written to the Sovrin ledger.
“DigiCert is a company built upon the premise that the challenges of digital security and identity can be solved in intuitive and human ways,” said Heather C. Dahl, Executive Director of the Sovrin Foundation. “This is the essence of what we are doing at Sovrin – building a network that enables trusted and intuitive interactions among people, organisations and even connected devices. Both the Sovrin Network and those who use it will benefit enormously from the depth of experience that DigiCert brings to us and we are very happy to add them as a steward.”
The Sovrin Network uses a purpose-built distributed ledger – technology frequently known as blockchain – to enable the secure exchange of cryptographically signed credentials. The diffuse trust model embodied in Sovrin stewards ensures the network’s independence and protection from outside interference – further placing individuals in control of their identities and at the centre of their digital interactions.
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