Open infrastructure software in the public interest
Why
The Internet, and our vital systems for water, energy, and communication, require safe software - free from for-profit motives.
Safe
Software
Open
Source
Public
Interest
What we do
We develop and maintain digital commons, open-source software and open standards for these vital systems.
Infrastructure projects
Smart grid protocols
As renewable energy resources increase, secure smart grid protocols are vital to optimizing our electricity grid.
Privilege boundary
The sudo utility mediates a critical privilege boundary on every open-source operating system that powers the Internet.
Time synchronization
Reliable, securely synchronized time is a building block for the Internet and other critical infrastructure.
Data compression
Almost all content sent over the Internet undergoes data compression using algorithms like zlib and zstd.
Ecosystem projects
Education - teach-rs
Teach-rs is a university course for computer science students, introducing the Rust Programming Language, and is available for anyone who wants to teach Rust.
Making Rust faster than C
Our mission is to make critical infrastructure software safer. We must eliminate performance considerations as a barrier for adoptiong the memory safe languange Rust in order to achieve this goal.
We believe that software must become safer; that this is paramount in critical infrastructure; and that Rust is an outstanding choice of technology for this purpose.
Our technologyRecent news and blogs
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Memory-safe sudo to become the default in Ubuntu
May 6, 2025 – Ubuntu 25.10 is set to adopt sudo-rs by default. Sudo-rs is a memory-safe reimplementation of the widely-used sudo utility, written in the Rust programming language.
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zlib-rs is faster than C
We've released version 0.4.2 of zlib-rs, featuring a number of substantial performance improvements. We are now (to our knowledge) the fastest api-compatible zlib implementation for decompression, and beat the competition in the most important compression cases too.
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Trifecta Tech Foundation joins Nonprofit Cyber
The first coalition of cybersecurity nonprofits focused on tangible results welcomes the addition of four new members: PuntoGal, Internet Security Research Group, Trifecta Tech Foundation, and The Retired Investigators Guild.
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ISPCS paper: Estimating noise for clock-synchronizing Kalman filters
Our Statime project now provides strong synchronization performance and accurate synchronization error estimates. David's paper, soon to be published by the IEEE, describes our Kalman-based approach.
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More Memory Safety for Let’s Encrypt: Deploying ntpd-rs
When we look at the general security posture of Let’s Encrypt, one of the things that worries us most is how much of the operating system and network infrastructure is written in unsafe languages like C and C++.
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A safe Internet requires secure time
The internet has a hole at the bottom of its trust stack, and we need to do something about it. In particular, the internet needs secure time synchronization to fortify the security of our digital world.
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On Rust, Memory Safety, and Open Source Infrastructure
Addressing memory safety in critical infrastructure is a complex issue with multiple approaches. The Sovereign Tech Fund supports several initiatives, including Pendulum's memory safe Network Time Protocol, that is highlighted in this article.
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Who we are
Trifecta Tech Foundation is a non-profit that develops and maintains digital commons, open-source software and open standards for vital systems.
More about us