Trust and Technology - Trust Theory: A Socio-Cognitive and Computational Model - page 339

used by industry and regarding the information being processed on a platform with specialized
security hardware (see (Josang, 2007) for more details); the so called Trust Management
((Blaze et al. , 1996)) mainly used for security in the distributed access control; the so called
Trusted Third Parthy (TTP, (Skevington and Hart, 1995)) describing systems in which the
presence of a reputed, disinterested, impartial and responsible entity that is accepted by all the
parties is guaranted.
The most interesting, recent works (relatively more oriented towards the very concept of
trust) in this area are: Trust-Serv (Skogsrud et al. , 2003), PolicyMaker (Grandison and Sloman,
2000), and KAoS (Uszok et al. , 2004). In these last systems and approaches the main goal is to
provide agents with credentials able to obtain trust from the system on the basis of predefined
policies. We have to say that even if these systems are a step towards the real concept of trust,
in general the main problem of the multi-agent systems is about how an agent can rely on
other agents for achieving its own goals (Huynh et al. , 2006).
An interesting distinction in the field is described by Rasmussen and Jansson (Rasmussen
and Jansson, 1996) between hard security and soft security , where hard security is referred to
the traditional IT (Information Technology) security mechanisms such as those above defined
(access control, authentication, and so on) while soft security is about deceitful and malicious
service providers that provide misleading, tricky or false information (Rasmussen and Jansson
called this security 'social control mechanisms').
In general we can say that establishing a true trust relationship is a more complex and
different thing with respect to security matter : the above described techniques cannot guarantee
that an interaction partner has the competence he claims or that he is honest about his own
intentions.
Trust is more than secure communication, e.g., via public key cryptography techniques:
the reliability of information about the status of your trade partner has little to do with
secure communication or with its identification. Maybe perceived security and safety are a
precondition and also an aspect of trust, but trust is a more complex and broad phenomenon .
Trust must give us tools for acting in a world that is in principle insecure where we have to
make the decision to rely on someone in risky situations .
For this reason the trust challenge is more complex and advanced (and therefore more
ambitious) than the one about security, even if there are relationships between them and the
solutions to the security problems represent a useful basis for coping with trust problems.
12.2 Trust Models and Technology
In the last fifteen years many studies and researches have been developed in the technological
field on trust (for a resume see (Marsh, 1994), (Castelfranchi and Tan, 1999), (Falcone et al. ,
2001), (Falcone et al. , 2003), (Ramchurn et al. , 2004), (Falcone et al. , 2005), (Huynh et al. ,
2006), (Cofta, 2007), (Falcone et al. , 2008), (Golbeck, 2009)). These works have analyzed
different aspects, models, and approaches to trust with the common goal of understanding and
introducing trusted relationships within the computational framework.
Let us consider the most relevant approaches to trust in the technological domain: the logical
approaches ,the computational approaches , and the socio-cognitive approaches . These three
approaches often have a varying overlap with each other, but the differences are given by
the relevance of the goals they mainly are pursuing. In this part of the topic we will omit to