TAPESTRY: Trust, Authentication and Privacy over a DeCentralised Social Registry

The aim of TAPESTRY is to investigate, develop and demonstrate transformational new technologies to enable people, businesses and digital services to connect safely online, exploiting the complex "tapestry" of multi-modal signals woven by their everyday digital interactions; their Digital Personhood. In this way we will de-risk the Digital Economy, delivering completely new ways of determining or engendering trust online, and enabling users and businesses to make better decisions about who they trust online.

Online fraud and scams cost the UK economy £670m each year; crimes often perpetrated through false identities. It is difficult to make good decisions about who to trust when the digital identities of people and services are presented through pseudonyms or addresses. How can we trust that the identity we are interacting with today wasn't created out of thin air yesterday to pull a scam? Or whether the service we are registering our personal data with is trustworthy? In an era of users curating multiple digital identities that evolve over their physical lifespan, and the coming ability to migrate identities between providers (most of whom reside outside the EU), there is an urgent need for decentralised technologies to enable proofs of trust between people and services wishing to interact safely within the Digital Economy.

TAPESTRY will co-create and evaluate prototype services with end-users to determine how online behaviour and attitudes to trust could evolve in the presence of a trusted decentralised technology to prove the veracity of online identities. TAPESTRY proposes to collect, on an opt-in basis, digital trails of users' interactions (photos shared, comments left, posts 'liked', IoT devices interacted with) as encrypted trust evidence within a decentralised database (blockchain). Users grant third parties access to trust evidence for a given time period and at a given granularity, in order to prove trustworthiness of their identity via their digital personhood. For example, a crowd-funder might invite new backers to submit 2 years' history of regular social media interactions to guard against fraudulent pledging from transient identities. Community forums are becoming increasingly important for emotional support and well-being. A similar check could safeguard against trolling, or an identity posting advice could collect positive ratings within their blockchain, enabling vetting of their reputation. Deviations from behavioural norms could also be detectable within TAPESTRY to alert users to their digital identity being hacked.

From a technological standpoint, the project will develop the decentralised infrastructure necessary to make sense of the vast number of digital interactions using multimodal signals aggregated via machine learning from social media and IoT interactions. Additionally, new cryptographic strategies will be needed to secure the privacy of trust evidence and to disseminate access on a granular basis. From a HCI and co-design perspective, the development of trust services and the shift to use of the digital personhood and interaction history as trust evidence will break new ground, fundamentally altering the way users think about identity and interaction online.

To undertake this adventurous and ambitious project we have formed a strategic multi-disciplinary partnership uniting world-leading groups in multi-modal signal processing and machine learning (CVSSP), a BIS/GCHQ recognised centre of excellence for Cyber Security (SCCS), the UK's first and only 5G test-bed for next-gen mobile and IoT (ICS/5GIC), and reflecting the importance of co-designing and evaluating technology in tight integration with end-users, two leading UK groups for socio-digital interaction (DJCAD) and interaction design (UNN).

End-user partners participating in the co-design and evaluation of TAPESTRY span the technology, legal, social reform, health and well-being and commercial sectors.

TAPESTRY develops transformational new technology enabling customers, businesses and digital services to establish mutual trust and interact with confidence over the Internet. These technologies will deliver long-term horizontal impact across all sectors within the Digital Economy, benefiting all end-users who require an intuitive and flexible platform to determine trustworthiness of a third party online, e.g. eCommerce, healthcare, government services, education, and in social interactions. TAPESTRY's de-centralised solutions to storage and verification of trust evidence offer a route towards an intelligent information infrastructure in which history of digital interactions will be leveraged to determine trust via the longevity, reputation and behavioural profile of digital identities. This will contribute to the infrastructure of existing and emerging digital economies by reducing risk of identity related fraud and preserving privacy.

TAPESTRY ensures relevance and impact of services through continuous engagement with end-users via four iterations of a participatory design process - spanning co-creation of services to deployment and evaluation. Each iteration focuses upon a case study reflecting the diversity of our end-user group, covering eCommerce, health and well-being, interpersonal relationship, and security scenarios. These are explored through involvement of the TAPESTRY Strategic Advisory Board (SAB) as partners and/or participants in trials and stakeholder workshops. The TAPESTRY SAB represents a broad spectrum of professional stakeholders for online trust; spanning legal (Charles Russell Speechlys), eCommerce (Surrey Chambers of Commerce and Enterprise M3 Local Enterprise Partnership), technology (Microsoft), and charitable organisations (Co-operation Ireland). These engagements also provide a route for, and expedites, commercial exploitation.

We will deliver vertical impact to specific sectors, through our end-user partners who will input to the co-creation of TAPESTRY service prototypes and trials. We will connect with SMEs via two major local enterprise partnerships, who will recruit businesses willing to trial our prototypes. We will connect with larger enterprises via Microsoft UK (with interests in privacy). Beyond business and finance we will connect with the Social Dimensions of Health Institute (SDHI) to ensure impact of our technology to societal well-being, impacting Digital Civics. TAPESTRY will vet digital identities to prevent 'trolling' in community forums offering support on emotional and healthcare issues. We will address reputational vetting of users within forums and personal dating sites (via relationships Moncur holds in ongoing work regarding digital break-ups). Through collaboration with Surrey's £70M 5G Innovation Centre (the UK's first and only 5G testbed) TAPESTRY will impact 5G development via work on behavioural profiling using IoT. Such profiling is essential in context-aware network management, within the emerging 5G standard, impacting next generation mobile infrastructure.

We are also committed to public engagement which will see outcomes packaged into consumable video-based (film) deliverables as part of a schools outreach programme engaging pre-university students in eSafety and future-scoping activities, further informing research objectives.

Academic impact will be delivered through targeting top-tier internationally-focused HCI venues such as ACM CHI, Ubicomp, CSCW, TOCHI. Outcomes in the multi-modal signal processing and secure systems space will be targeted at Tier-1 venues (PAMI, ICCV, IJCAI, ACM TISSEC, TDSC). Of potentially high impact is the capacity to bring to an HCI academic community results from a user-centred design project, which interleaves with deep investment and innovation in entirely novel ICT infrastructure for trust services. This represents 'working together' in a way that is relatively rare in HCI research.