This is a modern Web of Trust project by Sam Hart, designed to be forward-secure and fully Peer-to-Peer.

The term “Web of Trust” was coined in 1992 by the creator of the PGP, Phil Zimmermann. It referrs to a model of transitive trust he hoped would solve a social scalability problem facing adoption of E2E encryption.

E2EE communication relies on securely mapping individuals to held secrets. At the end of any cryptographic channel is an act of induction, “I believe who they are,” that is fundementally rooted in some real world experience.

Of course it’s impossible for everyone to physically observe everyone else attesting to secrets, nevermind keeping track over time. So the only solution is to take others at their word, and build belief by proxy.

PGP is a widely hated piece of software. And I can’t claim to have ever enjoyed the experience of using it myself. However, I don’t think we should be so quick to throw away the paradigm of relational authority entirely.

The goal of this project is to communicate a new kind of social form, and demonstrate some of these aspects through digital means. I’ll be frequently reference the open source software experiment I’ve been working on, Aura, which incorporates many of these ideas.