Page 16 - Trust in ICT 2017

1 Trust in ICT

provider or a service. For example, a service consumer assigns “very trustworthy” to the provider for a
transaction that he has performed. However, another consumer assigns “untrustworthy” for the similar
transaction from the same provider. These differences further increase the difficulty to determine the exact
trustworthiness of a provider.

As the world becomes more dependent on digital environments, particularly on ICT, telecommunication
infrastructure is increasingly recognized as a vital prerequisite for participation in today’s growing digital
economy. Broadband telecommunication infrastructure not just only improves the transmission speed at
which users send and receive multimedia data, but also allows service providers and individual users to
enhance legacy services and to develop previously inconceivable tools that improve business and society.
The benefits of broadband telecommunication infrastructure can expand beyond the ICT area itself,
accelerating throughout the economy and serving as an essential input for all other areas such as smart
building, smart city, smart farming, and so on. As a transformative technology, its role is similar to the impact
of electricity which induced growth and innovation over the last two centuries. Broadband
telecommunication infrastructure can also be an important enabler of civic and political advancement.
The introduction of sensors and devices into currently physical spaces poses particular challenges and
increases the sensitivity of the data that is being collected. Connected devices are effectively allowing
companies to digitally monitor our private activities. Moreover, the sheer volume of granular data generated
by a small number of devices allows those with access to the data to perform analyses, providing the ability
to make additional sensitive inferences and compile even more detailed profiles of consumer behaviour.

The processing and analysing big data leveraging by cloud computing technologies are becoming an
important resource that can lead to new knowledge, drive value creation, and foster new products, processes
and markets. However, the large scale collection and analysis of data can poses difficult privacy, security and
trust issues ranging from the risks of unanticipated uses of consumer data to the potential discrimination
enabled by data analytics and the insights offered into the movements, interests and activities of an
individual.
From recent advances toward a hyper-connected society from the increasing digital interconnection of
humans and objects for upcoming zettabyte era, ICT has played a significant role in the convenience of daily
life. However various problems due to the lack of trust have been anticipated as aforementioned. Therefore,
it is important to process and handle data in compliance with user needs and rights in various application
domains without human intervention. Based on the significant effort to build the converged ICT services and
reliable information infrastructure, ITU-T has recently started a new work on the future trusted ICT
infrastructure to cope with the emerging trends considering social and economic issues. Therefore, in order
to cope with the development of a large number of complex and intelligent applications and services, it is
needed to create a trusted environment for ICT infrastructure in order for sharing information and creating
knowledge. Consequently, there is a critical need to develop a trusted infrastructure as one of the most
important parts in the future ICT environment.

The ultimate purpose for trust provisioning in ICT infrastructure is to develop a trust infrastructure that
cooperates with ICT applications and services to assess and compute all aspects of trust among any entities
in the future ICT environments; in order to support these applications and services for better quality of
services and experience. The trusted service platform could be considered as a core service to secure
computing systems, networking applications and services in ICT environments, as Trust as a Service (TaaS).

This technical report contains the following key items:
• Section 4 describes definitions, key characteristics and features on trust from different perspectives
for a clear understanding of trust as standardization activities for trusted information infrastructure
in ITU-T CG-Trust.
• Section 5 illustrates various use cases for trust provisioning based on the technical report of ITU-T
CG-Trust, materials from other SDOs and related literature. In addition, this section also analyses
these uses cases in terms of purpose, method, actors and considerations for measuring trust.

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