Use Cases

Trustchain enables communities of any size to establish their own trustworthy public key infrastructure (PKI), without expensive setup costs or reliance on any third parties. Since PKI is fundamental digital infrastructure, it opens the door to a wide variety of use cases.

Here we describe four types of application that can be supported by Trustchain. Each represents an entire category of possible use cases.

Verifiable Credentials

Trustchain is designed to support ecosystems of verifiable digital credentials that put the user in control of their own data, providing the benefits of digital ID without the risks to privacy and data security. This solution is based on the principle that credential-issuing institutions ought to be uniquely and transparently identifiable, while individual users need not be.

We adopt the W3C standard for Verifiable Credentials, which specifies their technical details and also provides a useful introduction to the key concepts. This related document from the W3C focusses on the numerous use cases presented by the Verifiable Credentials model.

Data Provenance

Trustchain enables anybody to check the authenticity and provenance of data and digital media by verifying its integrity and the identity of its original source.

Every news article, every image, every video could be signed by the original publisher, to prove it has not been modified or tampered with since its release. And because Trustchain is open and decentralised, this ability is available to everyone, not just large content providers.

Verifiable URLs

There is currently no foolproof way to verify that a web page is legitimate before visiting it. This is a particular problem when URLs are displayed in QR codes at payment locations such as car parks or EV charging points, so-called QR code scams.

By tying together URLs and institutional identity, in a cryptographically verifiable way, Trustchain can provide robust defence against all types of phishing attacks, including QR code scams.

Secure Communication

Public Key Infrastructure is used on the Web to enable secure communication between clients and servers. Without this technology, online commerce and many services, such as internet banking, would be impossible.

However, all too often data sharing practices remain inefficient and insecure. For instance, when making loan or mortgage applications individuals often share sensitive information, such as bank statements, over insecure channels and in plain text. When provenance is required, it is common to resort to hard copies with physical signatures or stamps.

Trustchain provides a general solution to the problem of secure communication, including data sharing. It does this by creating a trustworthy PKI in which public key certificates refer to recognisable legal entities themselves (not merely their web domains), and different keys are available for different purposes. In that scenario, all data exchanges can be encrypted and their source verifiable, paving the way for a truly digital economy.