At 09:48 PM 7/2/2003 +0100, Danny Angus wrote:
Hi all,
There's been some talk about trust systems recently, I think I instigated
some of it, and I feel that a number of comments have been made which kind
of miss the point about trust. I'd like to outline my take on trust and why
I believe trust should be considered by this group.
First off trust isn't an absolute. Realistically I can only trust people I
know, and even then I could misjudge them. To rely on another person's
judgement is more risky still. It is also all wrong to think of trust as YES
or NO, there are degrees of trust, some people we'd trust with our lives,
others with our car keys, yet more with our phone numbers. We don't say YES
or NO to the phone number guys, we say "I trust you just enough not to abuse
this information"
Secondly in existing trust mechanisms it is possible, but not widely used,
for end users to make decisions about whom of trust issuers they will trust,
and accept the judgement of in assessing an unknown third party.
[..]
The trust problem has been mentioned in one of the Internet Drafts written
by IAB (http://www.iab.org/drafts/draft-iab-e2e-futures-02.txt):
---snip---
3.1 Lack of Trust
Perhaps the single most important change from the Internet of 15 years
ago is
the lack of trust between end nodes. Because the end users in the
Internet of
15 years ago were few, and were largely dedicated to using the Internet
as a
tool for computer science research and for communicating research results,
trust between end users (and thus between the end nodes that they use) and
between network operators and their users was simply not an issue in
general.
Today, the motivations of some individuals using the Internet are not
always
entirely ethical, and, even if they are, the assumption that end nodes will
always co-operate to achieve some mutually beneficial action, as implied
by the
end to end principle, is not always accurate. In addition, the growth in
users
who are either not technologically sophisticated enough or simply
uninterested
in maintaining their own security has required network operators to
become more
proactive in deploying measures to prevent naive or uninterested users from
inadvertently or intentionally generating security problems. One of the
most
common examples of network elements interposing between end hosts are those
dedicated to security: firewalls, VPN tunnel endpoints, certificate
servers,
etc. These intermediaries are designed to protect the network from
unimpeded
attack or to allow two end nodes that may have no inherent reason to
trust each
other to achieve some level of trust; but, at the same time, they act as
impediments for end to end communications.
----snip----
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