An intensional functional model of trust

Abstract

Computers have been in use for many years to build high confidence systems in safety-critical domains such as aircraft control, space transportation and exploration, and nuclear power plant management. However, due to the recent rush in developing ubiquitous and pervasive computing applications and a demand from across the world to access information from shared sources, the mosaic of computing ecosystem has undergone a radical change. It is in this context that computing has to be made trustworthy. To build and manage a trustworthy system it is necessary to blend and harmonize socially acceptable and technically feasible norms of trust. This in turn requires a generic formal model in which trust categories can be specified, trusted communication can be enabled, and trustworthy transactions can be specified and reasoned about. In this paper we introduce a formal intensional model of trust and suggest how it can be integrated into a trust management system. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.