Sovereign and self-determined data exchange is becoming increasingly important for companies as part of their business model. A basis for this secure data exchange is now provided by the “Dataspace Connector” (DSC) as open-source software. The DSC implementation concept developed by Fraunhofer ISST has been successfully reviewed according to the certification criteria with “IDS-ready” of the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA).
“The DSC fulfills the security requirements and all functionalities required by the International Data Spaces (IDS) for trustworthy data sharing with others while ensuring data sovereignty. This makes it the first open source connector that is IDS approved – free to use with no license fees”
Sebastian Steinbuss, CTO at IDSA.
The goal of the Dataspace Connector is to provide companies with an easy and trustworthy entry into the International Data Spaces. There are a total of three levels of certification for the IDS: Base, Trusted and Trusted+. The DSC was deliberately reviewed for the Base certification level, as this does not require specific hardware such as Trusted Platform Module chips in order to use the connector. This makes it easier to use the DSC on different hardware and in cloud environments with reasonable sacrifice of hardware security features.
In addition, the Dataspace Connector is the only IDS connector that already supports enforcement of eight International Data Spaces Association usage condition classes, exceeding the Base certification level.
Interested companies and users can view the Dataspace Connector source code directly on Github. For testing, all that is needed is a Java environment to launch the Connector and then use it via Swagger UI or http calls. In addition, the Connector can be integrated into a Docker or Kubernetes environment.
More information is available here:
About the Source Code of the Dataspace Connector (DSC): https://github.com/FraunhoferISST/DataspaceConnector
White Papers about the cerfication of International Data Spaces (IDS): https://internationaldataspaces.org/publications/white-papers
Terms of use of the Dataspace Connector (DSC): https://github.com/FraunhoferISST/DataspaceConnector/wiki/Usage-Control-(Patterns)
