Digital Trust - Trusted Computing and Beyond A Position Paper

Along with the invention of computers and interconnected networks, physical societal notions like security, trust, and privacy entered the digital environment. The concept of digital environments begins with the trust (established in the real world) in the organisation/ individual that manages the digital resources. This concept evolved to deal with the rapid growth of the Internet, where it became impractical for entities to have prior offline (real world) trust. The evolution of digital trust took diverse approaches and now trust is defined and understood differently across heterogeneous domains. This paper looks at digital trust from the point of view of security and examines how valid trust approaches from other domains are now making their way into secure computing. The paper also revisits and analyses the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) along with associated technologies and their relevance in the changing landscape. We especially focus on the domains of cloud computing, mobile computing and cyber-physical systems. In addition, the paper also explores our proposals that are competing with and extending the traditional functionality of TPM specifications.