A simple approach is a list of trusted locations for servers and hosts. Next to this there are trusted third parties, like McAfee, who flag other sites as ‘evil site’ or not. In peer-to-peer environments, where computers communicate without a regular structure, an experience-based trust is used. For humans this works quite well. “If I have a lot of good interactions with you, it is an investment of your time. If you do that just to frame me, at least it will cost a significant investment of work for you. For computers, experience-based trust is more challenging. A number of good interactions is not necessarily a significant investment for a computer. You can send a few files and then turn evil.”
A different aspect of trust according to van Splunter is that a basic level of trust is just needed. We are forced to trust the few top domain name servers, for example, most of which are American hands. We need to trust that the power to redirect all sorts of router information to other parties is not misused. Computer environments remain dependent on humans providing the infrastructure of communication.
Basic trust is needed
In distributed environments the issue of trust is significant. Therefore a distinction is made between trusted and non-trusted environments. In these environments the kind of interactions differ based on the level of trust of the hosts.
