Trust and Trustworthiness in Information and Communications Technologies

Trust serves as the glue and cornerstone of human society and emerges as a critical enabler of information and communications technologies (lCT). Despite its importance, trust remains a debated concept with different viewpoints and limitations from diverse theories. In this study, we define the concept of trust and trustworthiness in a useful and measurable way with a rigorous mathematical basis. While our study does not resolve all disagreements about trust, we seek the fewest common elements necessary to define generic trust for achieving the minimum consensus across the broadest contexts. Based on our trust definition, we exploit the dynamic trust inference and analyze the trust transfer across different contexts, as well as the trust propagation through multiple entities. To demonstrate the applicability of our trust notion, we present two illustrative case studies: evaluating the trustworthiness of a mobile network operator communicating over a fading channel and assessing the trustworthiness of a miner in safe-guarding a blockchain from being subverted.