A Mechanism for Trust Sustainability Among Trusted Computing Platforms

Trust plays an important role in social life as well as in cyberspace. Trust establishment in cyberspace relies on human beings as well as digital components. Trusted computing platform (TCP) was proposed to improve the trust between users and their devices. However, current TCP lacks solutions for trust sustainability among TCPs, so that trust relationship might be broken after a period of time. In order to solve this problem, this paper presents a mechanism for sustaining trust among TCPs. The mechanism builds up the trust relationship based on the root trust module (RTM) at a trustee and ensures the trust sustainability according to pre-defined conditions approved at the time of trust establishment and enforced through the use of the pre-attested RTM until the intended purpose is fulfilled. The paper also presents the applicability of the trust sustainability mechanism in several application areas.