Federated Ecosystem

Full Title or Meme

A sub-set of living and non-living components what work together in the real-world to increase the information content of the local environment.

Context

• The most current paradigm for digital Ecosystems is the internet taken together with the definitions and components maintained by ICANN, for example the Domain Name System which servers as the root for all URLs used on the internet.
  • As originally envisioned the URL obtained with a name lookup that started with the ICAN root server would result in an Identifier in ASCII that was human-readable.
  • As the internet expanded beyond its original basis in ARPANET, the new languages and cultures turned to the Identifiers returned by the name lookup into something that was easy to spoof.
• The domain name was defined to be extensible, for example endpoint.company.com can be converted to an IP address by the following steps:

1. ICANN root server will provided a link to the .com domain, which can be considered as a federation of business sites.
2. .com name server will provide a link to the company.com domain which gets an Enterprise server which hosts a collection of servers controlled by the Enterprise.
3. company.com server will provide a link to one particular server (perhaps one of many) that can services a request.
4. endpoint.company.com can initiate further navigation based on the contents of the URL as needed.

• There are (at least) two ways to look at a Federated Ecosystem:

1. This page is primarily about open Web Sites including: Relying Party, Identifier or Attribute Provider and Trusted Third Party.
2. The NIST Public Working Group on Federated Cloud (PWGFC) includes the User which is appropriate for closed systems, like citizens of a country, or employees of a company

Problems

• So how can a User know enough about a Web Site to make a trust decision about it.
• As noted above the URL has failed in its goal to be human-readable as it was pulled in other directions.
• EV Certs were established with a view to solve this problem, but have failed for reason noted on that page.

Solutions

• A Federated Ecosystem considers how to partition the solution into federations using the existing paradigm of the DNS, but starting from a source of Trust and maintaining that Trust as the federation Evolves.
• As a working hypothesis we will consider the use case where the federation creates Identifiers based on a new secure schema, it is to be expected that other use cases will be considered before a final paradigm shift is established to a fully Federated Ecosystem.