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Trust in ICT 3

8 Architectural overview for trust provisioning for ICT infrastructures

8.1 Generic ICT trust conceptual model
From the concept of trust provisioning for a trusted ICT infrastructure described in Clause 7, a generic ICT
trust conceptual model is shown in Figure 8-1 to clarify architectural overview for trust provisioning for ICT
infrastructures. The model comprises three different domains vertically (i.e., social, cyber and physical
domains) and three different horizontal components (i.e., humans & objects, networking & environment and
data). In addition, there are multiple service domains for supporting a multiplicity of applications. This model
intends to illustrate the complex relationships and required roles for trust provisioning between and across
domains which are associated with an individual entity of ICT infrastructures and services.

Service Domain #n
Trusted ICT

Service Domain #2 Infrastructure
Service Domain #1
Social/Cyber/Physical
Domain Trust
Social
Social Domain Humans Data

Cyber Domain S/W, Cyber
Process Data

Cross-Domain
Physical Domain H/W, Physical Service Trust
Devices Data
Humans & Networking & Data
Objects Environment

Figure 8-1 – A generic ICT trust conceptual model

Physical trust
A physical domain contains a huge number of objects (i.e., H/W or device) including sensors, actuators,
mobile terminals, which generate data by using sensing technologies to sense physical objects and their
behaviours within their environments (e.g., temperature, pressure, etc.). Collecting secure and reliable data
from physical objects is the first step to provide trustworthy ICT services and applications because the
propagation and process of false data will cause service degradation and waste system resources.
In order to detect trust problems in the physical domain such as injections of obstructive signals, malfunctions
of systems, shutdowns or accidents, the operations of the physical objects and their data must be examined.
Since many data are created from constrained devices, lightweight trust mechanisms are needed for data
processing trust (e.g., efficiency, accuracy, reliability, etc.).

Cyber trust
A cyber domain includes virtual objects such as software agents, services and applications working over
computing, storage and networking components. These virtual objects are seamlessly interconnected and
cooperated for data coding, transmission, fusion, mining and analysing to provide information and
knowledge to humans independent of location in fixed/mobile environments.

In order to safely cooperate between virtual objects, they have to distinguish malicious and non-malicious
objects. One way to resolve this challenge is to evaluate the trust with their specific goal to decide which

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