NGI0 PET details its expected impacts in relation to the work done so far in the Periodic Technical Report Part B. The first expected impact of NGIO PET is to significantly advance privacy and trust enhancing technologies, for example through:
- Replicant, postmarketOS, mobile-nixos and Maemo Leste - private-by-design mobile phone operating systems.
- Libre-SOC - the world’s first OpenPower ISA implementation outside of IBM to go to silicon, open source to the bedrock.
- BigBlueButton, Jitsi, Movim, Conversations and Dino - instant messaging and audio/video conferencing tools now end-to-end encryption.
These and other granted projects are developing usable, extendable privacy and trust enhancing technology that are ready to protect our communication at internet scale. Projects are well divided among the different categories of technology building blocks:
- Trustworthy hardware and manufacturing: 38 projects
- Network infrastructure incl. routing, P2P and VPN: 22 projects
- Software engineering, protocols, interoperability, cryptography, algorithms, proofs: 46 projects
- Operating Systems, firmware and virtualisation: 29 projects
- Measurement, monitoring, analysis and abuse handling: 10 projects
- Middleware + identity, including DNS, authorisation, authentication, distribution/deployment, operations, reputation systems: 24 projects
- Decentralised solutions, including blockchain/distributed ledger: 14 projects
- Data and AI: 7 projects
- Services + Applications (e.g. email, instant messaging, video chat, collaboration): 33 projects
- Vertical use cases, Search, Community: 1 project
The second expected impact is to increase the level of cooperation in the domain of privacy and trust enhancing technologies. There are many clusters of projects where such cooperation took place, for instance in the field of open hardware projects. Within NGI0 PET, researchers have been developing both transparent tools to make user-centric chips and devices, as well as the crucial components to make this verifiably trustworthy hardware.
As stated, there were many more projects where such synergy was created, around e.g. email encryption, E2EE and audio/video support in standards based instant messaging, mobile operating systems, privacy-friendly analytics, etc. Please see the overview of projects, noting that there was also synergy with projects elsewhere in NGI and in particular sister programmes NGI0 Discovery, NGI Assure, NGI Pointer and NGI Dapsi which also funded quite a few follow up efforts.
The third expected impact is for project outcomes to be accessible, secure, ready for internationalization, legally sound and conveniently available for users. NGI0 PET ensures this unique quality assurance for projects through support services detailed above and in the report. These services actively prepare outcomes of granted projects to be used on internet scale and as such, help deliver privacy and trust enhancing technology for users everywhere.
The fourth expected impact is to influence development of the internet ecosystem. Our goal is to create a fast lane for adoption of NGI0 PET output. The NGI initiative is only successful when it prove that we can actually change the internet of today and realistically transition to more resilient, trustworthy and sustainable networks while we are using them.
The fifth expected major impact is to establish standards. Several technologies have been submitted to or are part of a ongoing process of standardisation within standards setting organisations like IETF, W3C, OASIS and the XMPP Foundation. Taking part in internet and technology standardization to better protect user privacy is an important aspect of bringing the future internet one step closer.
