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Trust in ICT 3

6.2 Trust in ICT Environments

As trust can be interpreted in different ways, there are various meanings from literature for more clear views
on trust in terms of telecommunication systems and ICT.
The term trust in the context of ICT world differs from the concept of trust among people. This notion of trust
stands in contrast to some more intuitive notions of trust expressing that someone behaves in a particular
well-behaved way. Trust in ICT is an important concept in the sense that a trusted resource is one that you
are forced by necessity to trust. The failure of this resource would compromise the function, integrity or
security of a system which are not in expected ways.
Nevertheless, trust is an important feature in the decision-making process not only used by humans in daily
life but also by applications and services in ICT environment.
Trust in computer science in general can be classified into two broad categories: “user” and “system”. The
notion of “user” trust is derived from psychology and sociology, with a standard definition as “a subjective
expectation an entity has about another’s future behaviour.” “System” trust is “the expectation that a device
or system will faithfully behave in a particular manner to fulfil its intended purpose.”

Trust in an on-line transaction can be divided into two types: direct (personal) trust and third party trust.
Direct trust is a situation where a trusting relationship is nurtured by two entities. This type of trust is formed
after these entities have interacted with each other. The entity A inherently trusts entity B after a number of
successful transactions that involved both entities. On the contrary, third-party trust is a trust relationship of
an entity that is formed from the third party recommendations. For example, entity A trusts entity B because
B is trusted by entity C and C recommends that B is trustful. In this example, entity A derives trust of B from
C, and A also trusts entity C does not lie to him.
Due to dynamics of network configuration and resources, trust issue occurs not only in the human to human
network, but also in machine to machine and human to machine and vice versa. In other words, trust is
needed not only for people to maintain social network service benefit, but also for machine to be connected
safely to network. System/network-related trust is the beliefs that a specific technology has the attributes
necessary to perform as expected in a given situation in which negative consequences are possible [b-
McKnight].
Trust is a broad concept used in many disciplines and subject areas but until now, there is no commonly
agreed definition. Therefore, ITU-T CG-Trust has newly defined the terms “trust” Clause 3.2.1. As per the
definition, trust in the ICT world is defined as “Trust is an accumulated value from history and the expecting
value for future. Trust is quantitatively and/or qualitatively calculated and measured, which is used to
evaluate values of physical components, value-chains among multiple stakeholders, and human behaviours
including decision making.” Trust value is applied to social, cyber and physical domains. Figure 6-1 shows
various related attributes for trust in social, cyber and physical domains.
NOTE 1 – Clause 7 presents the details of social, cyber and physical domains.
NOTE 2 – Appendix I provides the summary of trust definitions from various viewpoints.

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