Page 184 - Trust in ICT 2017

3 Trust in ICT

malicious intentions, it could suffer from irreparable damage and uncertain dangers. However, it is difficult
to identify and prevent risks of knowledge in complicated ICT infrastructures.

The convergent services have been required to obtain reliable knowledge from raw data. As an aim of
intelligent service provision is to make autonomous decisions without human intervention, trust has been
highlighted as a key issue in the processing and handling of data, as well as the provisioning of services which
comply with users’ needs and rights. Therefore, we need to find a way to minimize the unexpected risks and
maximizing the survivability of future knowledge societies. Within certain reliability and predictability, the
ICT infrastructure can be operating in a controlled environment. It should be robust to unexpected conditions
and adaptable to system failures.
Based on the significant efforts made to build converged ICT services and a reliable information
infrastructure, ITU-T has recently started new work on future trusted ICT infrastructures. These
infrastructures will be able to accommodate emerging trends in ICT, while taking into account social and
economic considerations. Thus, this report addresses trust provisioning for future ICT infrastructures and
services which act as the glue for integrating physical, cyber and social worlds with ICT as a basis for
knowledge societies. It provides the trust conceptual model and the trust architectural framework to cope
with potential risks due to the lack of trust. The aim is to create a trusted ICT infrastructure for sharing
information and creating knowledge and to stimulate activities for future standardization on trust with
related Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs).

6 Understanding of Trust

6.1 Generic definitions of trust
As a lexical-semantic, trust means reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or object.
Generally trust is used as a measure of confidence that an entity will behave in an expected manner, despite
the lack of ability to monitor or control the environment in which it operates.
Trust concept itself is a complicated notion with different meanings depending on both participators and
situations and influenced by both measurable and non-measurable factors. There are various kinds of trust
definitions leading to difficulties in establishing a common, general notation that holds, regardless of personal
dispositions or differing situations. Generally, trust is considered as a computational value depicted by a
relationship between trustor and trustee, described in a specific context and measured by trust metrics and
evaluated by a mechanism.

Previous research has shown that trust is the interplay among human, social sciences and computer science,
affected by several subjective factors such as social status and physical properties; and objective factors such
as competence and reputation [b-Alcalde]. The competence is measurement of abilities of the trustee to
perform a given task which is derived from trustee’s diplomas, certifications and experience. Reputation is
formed by the opinion of other entities, deriving from third parties’ opinions of previous interactions with
the trustee.

Trust revolves around assurance and confidence that people, data, entities, information or processes will
function or behave in expected ways. At the deeper level, trust is regarded as a consequence of progress
towards security or privacy objectives.
Trust is crucial that it affects the appetite of an entity to use services or products offered by another entity.
This trust may come from our past experience of using these brands’ products (termed “belief”) or from their
reputations that are perceived from 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”).

It is challenging to concisely define “trust” of an entity due to its uniqueness to each individual entity. From
a sociological point of view, trust is defined as the trusting behaviour that one person has on another person
in a situation where an ambiguous path exists. In such definition, trust is used to mitigate the risks of the
dealings with others. Trust is also considered as the capacity and belief of an entity that the other entity
would meet its expectations.

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