Increasingly important social processes are migrating to an increasingly decentralized, inter-organizational information infrastructure. This work investigates the resulting trust issues. Are there grounds for one entity, Alice, to trust a remote entity Bob, with a particular task? When such grounds exist, how can this information be securely transmitted across the boundaries that separate Bob from Alice? Do Alice's applications and tools enable her to make the appropriate trust judgment?
This research begins with the technology of public key infrastructure (PKI), because it can communicate assertions without sharing secrets, and trusted computing platforms, because of they can potentially create islands of trust within a distributed infrastructure. The research will catalog archetypical examples of mismatches between current technology and human trust requirements, designe a series of experimental systems that seek to eliminate these mismatches, build the strongest design candidates, validate these designs in real pilot systems, and formalize the resulting design criteria. By creating a framework that ties PKI and trusted computing to the core problem of human trust, this project will advance understanding of the technology necessary to support trust and hasten the realization of that trustworthiness in our society's information infrastructure.
