On Trust for Ubiquitous Computing

As we move into a world of ubiquitous and pervasive computing, there is an increased interaction between people and smart devices, which have computing power. In such a world, computing power is moving from big desktops to very small and miniature devices and there is a seamless integration of computing power and day-to-day life. For such a world of computing, we believe that there is a need for a continuum of trust, which models the real world, as closely as possible. In other words, we need to capture the real world model of trust where entities (people and devices) trust each other to varying degrees and extents. Moreover, we believe that in the world of pervasive computing, an entity's physical context (which could be the location of the entity, or even a property like time) is an important factor in modeling trust (because of ad-hoc interactions). In other words, we need a unified model of trust relationship between entities, which captures both the needs of the traditional world of computing (where the continuum of trust is based on identity) and of the world of ubiquitous and pervasive computing (where the continuum of trust is based on identity, physical context or a combination of both). In this paper, we present a novel attribute vector calculus based approach for modeling the continuum of trust.