The public key infrastructure, based on placing one’s trust in trusted third parties (TTPs), is indeed widely used in many Internet verticals today. PKI typically consists of one or more trusted Certificate Authorities (CAs) which bind cryptographically useful public identities - cryptographic public keys - with other real-world identities, such as legal names of organizations and individuals. These bindings, typically expressed as Certificates, are as trustworthy as the third party CA issuing the Certificates. If trust in the CA is compromised, the Certificates become invalid and the affected Internet vertical suffers downtime as a result, as various Certificate revocation and re-issuance processes ensue.

In contrast, Milaneum does not rely on TTPs at all, even though it may leverage the PKI if the latter is available. Trust is anchored primarily in verifiable logic embedded within one or more version-controlled computer programs which may be executed on decentralized computer platforms that, in principle, no one owns. This makes Milaneum capable of providing more powerful and expressive trust invariants that are continuously verifiable in the context of various real-world Internet verticals. This helps Milaneum enable emerging Internet verticals where breaches of trust are prohibitively costly, without losing backwards compatibility with PKI.

In sharp contrast to PKI, for specific categories of breaches of trust, Milaneum’s digital trust technology also enables algorithmic remediation of breaches of trust even after the breach. This is typically done via automated or manual construction of mathematical proofs of non-repudiation based on records which are exchanged by the entities during interactions done under the assumption of full trust, independent of whether a TTP is involved. These records may be thought of as being breadcrumbs of trust.

Milaneum software and protocols are being mindfully designed to be drop-in replacements for PKI-reliant protocols and software at various layers of the protocol stack. When ready, they should be available for download on this site, or via standard package managers and related facilities in commonly used Operating Systems like Linux, MacOS, and Windows.

We are working hard to release Milaneum software and the underlying protocols for testing and review by anyone on the Internet. If you’d like to be an early adopter and provide feedback, we’d gratefully welcome your involvement and would love to hear from you. Please send us an email, requesting a free subscription to the milaneum-users@milaneum.io group.

Please visit our dedicated Q&A page for the next level of detail. Relevant details about the underlying technical concepts can be found in the articles page. One might also want to keep an eye on the software page for testable software implementations of Milaneal technology. Some of these software can be test-driven from a reasonably modern standards-compliant Internet browser.