Methodology to Bridge Different Domains of Trust in Mobile Communications

Trust is playing an important role in communications and transactions. Based on different reasons of trust, different trusted domains, possibly disjoint, are formed in mobile communications, preventing complete systems from working properly. What is lacked therein is a bridge that can link domains, across trust gaps to establish a complete trusted mobile communication system. In this paper, the authors propose a generic method to analyze and model a mobile communication system into a number of trusted domains. In order to overcome the trust gaps among the originally disjoint domains, the authors further propose three approaches to bridge different domains and demonstrate the use of mobile Personal Trusted Devices, such as mobile handsets to act as the said bridge.