The Pudding of Trust

In this essay, we poke at several sacred cows (even though we like their milk and drink it ourselves) and point out several overlooked ordinary cows as well. We discuss our little herd of claims in five sections. Trust— " reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or thing " 1 —is pervasive in social systems. We constantly apply it in interactions between people, organizations , animals, and even artifacts (" Can I trust my car on this vacation trip? "). We use it instinctively and implicitly in closed and static systems, or consciously and explicitly in open or dynamic systems. An epitome for the former case is a small village, where everybody knows everybody, and the villagers instinctively use their knowledge or stereotypes to trust or distrust their neighbors. A big city exemplifies the latter case, where people use explicit rules of behavior in diverse trust relationships. A city dweller builds up trust, for instance, by asking friends or recommendation services for a dependable plumber. If trust is so pervasive and beneficial in complex social systems, why not exploit pervasive trust as a paradigm in computing environments? (Using pervasive trust in non-pervasive computing is not a contradiction!) We already use trust in computing systems extensively, although usually subconsciously. Examples are users' trust-based decisions to search for reputable ISPs or e-banking sites, or to ignore emails from " Nigerians " asking for help transferring millions of dollars out of their country. The challenge for exploiting trust in computing lies in extending the use of trust-based solutions, first to artificial entities such as software agents or subsystems, then to human users' subconscious choices. If you can spot one trend in intelligent systems, I think it would be the issue of trust. I've seen many paper titles and recently some workshops that involve the term " trust. " At the same time, I've wondered what kind of trust people want their computers to manage. Intuitively, we all know that trust is important and precious, something we might work hard to earn from others and might not assign generously when things really matter. But what is trust in computing? The literature gives numerous answers: reputation, security concerns , quality of data or services, credentials, risk management, and many more. 1 They all can play a role when dealing with trust. So, when trying to define trust in computing, we end …