Normative specification
PTI Specification v1.0
Vendor-neutral requirements for portable, programmable, interoperable trust, production, exchange, resolution, and consumption across institutional boundaries.
Portable Trust Infrastructure (PTI) v1.0 defines a vendor-neutral architecture for generating, exchanging, resolving, and consuming trust intelligence across institutional boundaries. This specification separates trust production (signal ingestion and attestation) from trust consumption (lookup, verification, and decision support).
Normative language
The key words MUST: MUST NOT: REQUIRED: SHALL: SHALL NOT: SHOULD: SHOULD NOT: RECOMMENDED: MAY: and OPTIONAL in this specification are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.
Specification goals
PTI v1.0 addresses four interoperability problems:
- Fragmentation: credible activity signals remain locked in single-institution silos.
- Opacity: decision systems lack structured provenance and explainability.
- Context collapse: unrelated life areas are conflated into a single opaque score.
- Programmability: institutions cannot integrate trust outcomes through stable APIs and schemas.
Implementations that conform to this specification MUST preserve context isolation, provenance chains, and subject rights while enabling cross-institutional trust exchange.
Conformance classes
| Class | Description |
|---|---|
| Trust Producer | Ingests events, emits signals, and attests evidence within entitled trust contexts. |
| Trust Consumer | Requests trust lookups, verifies assertions, and applies policy at decision time. |
| Trust Registry | Maintains subject directory, identity resolution, and entitlement metadata. |
| Trust Exchange | Routes events and assertions between producers and consumers under governance policy. |
| Trust Intelligence Engine | Derives context-scoped outcomes, confidence bands, and explainability artifacts. |
A deployment MAY implement one or more classes. Hybrid deployments MUST enforce tenant and context boundaries defined in the Authorization Model.
Document catalogue
| Document | Scope |
|---|---|
| Architecture | Normative system architecture, components, and trust planes |
| Security | Threat model, controls, cryptography, and audit requirements |
| Governance | Roles, consent, retention, and accountability obligations |
| Privacy | Data minimization, subject rights, and lawful processing |
| Interoperability | Profiles, bindings, and cross-vendor exchange rules |
| Reference Data Model | Identity, trust context, signal, and assertion objects |
| Reference Event Model | Trust event schema, lifecycle, and idempotency |
| Community Event Model | Community plane community_event.v1 envelope (parallel to TrustEvent) |
| Reference API Specification | Abstract Trust Lookup, Exchange, and Registry APIs |
| Reference Error Codes | Standard error taxonomy and handling |
| Versioning Strategy | Schema and API version negotiation |
| Authentication Model | Credential types and verification for PTI APIs |
| Authorization Model | Scopes, entitlements, and tenant boundaries |
Non-normative companion material:
- Reference Architecture, conceptual models and diagrams
- Glossary, canonical term definitions
- Implementation Guide, integration patterns and migration
- Explainability, explainability artifact contract
- Compliance, risk and compliance integration profile
Architectural overview
Reading order
- Architecture and Reference Data Model for structural foundations.
- Reference Event Model and Reference API Specification for integration contracts.
- Authentication Model, Authorization Model, and Security before production deployment.
- Governance and Privacy for policy alignment with regulators and data-protection authorities.
Version identifier
This document set is identified as pti-spec/1.0. Implementations SHOULD advertise supported specification versions in API metadata and registry profiles.
Reference implementations
Vendor-specific deployments that implement PTI v1.0 concepts are documented separately. TumiTrust provides a reference trust platform with producer ingest, institutional lookup APIs, and context-scoped intelligence exports. Reference implementations MUST NOT be treated as extensions to this normative specification unless explicitly profiled in Interoperability.