---
title: About
---
## Who we are

TLSNotary is an open-source protocol developed by the **Privacy Stewards of Ethereum (PSE)** research and development lab of the Ethereum Foundation.

TLSNotary is not a new project; in fact, it has been around for **more than a decade**. In 2022, TLSNotary was rebuilt from the ground up in **Rust** incorporating state-of-the-art cryptographic protocols. This renewed version of the TLSNotary protocol offers enhanced security, privacy, and performance.

## How it works

TLSNotary is a protocol which allows people to export data from any web application and prove facts about it to a third-party in a privacy-preserving way by leveraging secure multi-party computation (MPC) to authenticate data communicated between a Prover and a TLS-enabled web server.

![](../../diagrams/light/overview_prover_verifier.svg#gh-light-mode-only)
![](../../diagrams/dark/overview_prover_verifier.svg#gh-dark-mode-only)


### 1 - TLS Transcript Commitment

The Prover requests data from a Server over TLS. The verifier cooperates in secure and privacy-preserving multi-party computation (MPC). This cooperation guarantees that the Prover can not cheat and allows the Verifier to check the authenticity of the data in step 3.

### 2 - Selective Disclosure

The Prover selectively discloses the data to the Verifier by redacting sensitive information prior to sharing it. Selective disclosure may involve simple redactions, or more advanced techniques such as a zero-knowledge proofs that can prove properties of redacted data without revealing the data itself.

### 3 - Data Verification

The Verifier verifies that the prover did not tamper with the data and also verifiers the data origin, by inspecting the Server certificate through trusted certificate authorities (CAs). The Verifier can now make assertions about the non-redacted content of the transcript.

## Get involved

An alpha version of the TLSNotary protocol is available for testing. We welcome folks to start playing around with it, including trying to break it!

Both codebases are 100% Rust and compile to WASM targets with an eye on deployment into browser environments. All our code is and always will be open source! Dual-licensed under Apache 2 and MIT, at your choice.

## References

TLSNotary draws inspiration and ideas from academic literature, including but not limited to:

- DECO: Liberating Web Data Using Decentralized Oracles for TLS [(paper)](https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.00938)
- Lightweight Authentication of Web Data via Garble-Then-Prove [(paper)](https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/964)
- Janus: Fast Privacy-Preserving Data Provenance For TLS [(paper)](https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1377)
