Page 15 - Trust in ICT 2017

Trust in ICT 1

SSN Semantic Sensor Network
TA Technical Attribute
TaaS Trust as a Service

TC Trust Certificate
TCG Trusted Computing Group
TEP Trust Establishment Protocol

TLS Transport Layered Security
TM Trust Metric
TNC Trusted Network Connect

TPM Trusted Platform Module
TSL Transport Security Layer

TTL Time to Live
UE User Equipment
USB Universal Serial Bus

USDL Unified Service Description Language
VANET Vehicular Ad Hoc Network

WPH Wireless Portable Hard drive
WSN Wireless Sensor Network

XaaS Everything as a Service

3 Introduction
Trust is a broad concept with application across many disciplines and subject areas but with no commonly
agreed definition. A review of the economic literature on trust found that the existence of uncertainty was
one factor present in most definitions of trust. It is a critical factor that highly influences the likelihood of
entities to interact and transact in digital environments. Trust is crucial that it affects the appetite of an entity
to consume a particular service or product offered by another entity. This example can be seen in our
everyday life where trust decisions are made. When purchasing a specific product, we may favour certain
brands due to our trust that these brands will provide excellent quality compare to the unknown brands.
Trust on these brands may come from our past experience of using these brands’ products (termed “belief”)
or from their reputations that are perceived from other people who bought items and left their opinions
about those products (termed “reputation”), or from suggestions of your surrounding such as families and
friends (termed “recommendation”).
Similarly, trust also affects the decision of an entity to transact with other entity in online environment. Both
consumers and providers in an electronic market must trust each other before decisions to consume or to
provide the services are made. If trust is not established between them, fraudulent transactions may occur
regularly. Such situation would disadvantage the honest consumers and providers, and it further refrain them
from taking the advantage of the online transactions. The significance of trust also applies in digital
environments where a high number of entities mutually interact with each other to provide and consume
the information and/or resources.

Although the significance of trust in our physical world is as important as it is in the digital environments,
building trust and confidence in the latter is much more difficult. This is due to our inability to have the
physical view on an entity, unlike in our physical world where we can view the building of the bank, observe
its safe deposits, meet the bank personnel, etc. Another issue with trust is that it is difficult to quantify the
exact trustworthiness value of an entity. This is even harder when each entity have different interpretation
and perception of the term “trustworthy”. Therefore, they may assign different trustworthiness values for a

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