Using Trust on the Internet

Trust is a concept we heavily use in everyday life because it allows us to cope with the complexity of interactions with other people. This concept is also implicitly used throughout the Internet, both in the infrastructure and in the end-user services. Since security problems on the Internet are becoming more and more serious, and thus present a threat to the further growth of the Internet, there is ongoing research that tries to turn trust into the first class component of the Internet architecture. In this paper we review concept of a trust and we give short review of the security problems on the Internet. We argue that those problems are fundamental in nature and, using current mechanisms, will never be solved appropriately. As a potential solution to this problem we discuss architecture modifications, related protocols and procedures that would allow trust to be an explicit part of the Internet. The goal of this paper is to form a base for further research on the trust issues of the Internet.