Evolution and challenges in trust and security in information system infrastructures

• Authors: Vijay Varadharajan
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Security of information and networks
• Year: 2009

In these uncertain economic times, two key ingredients which are in short supply are trust and confidence. The concept of trust has been around for many decades (if not for centuries) in different disciplines such as business, psychology, philosophy as well as in security technology. The current financial climate gives a particularly prescient example. As financial journalist Walter Bagehot wrote some 135 years ago, "after a great calamity, everybody is suspicious of everybody" and "credit, the disposition of one man to trust another, is singularly varying." The problem, as Bagehot observed it, was trust, or rather the lack of it, and it's as true today as it was in his time. Financial mechanisms aren't the only entities that must deal with trust--today's social networking communities such as Facebook, Wikipedia, and other online communities have to constantly reconcile trust issues, from searching and locating credible information, to conveying and protecting personal information. Furthermore with ever increasing reliance on digital economy, most business and government activities today depend on networked information systems for their operations. In this talk, we'll take a short journey through the concept and evolution of trust in the secure computing technology world, and examine some of the challenges involved in trusted computing today.