Think-Trust

Project coordinator WIT presented a paper entitled, "Trust-terms Ontology for Defining Security Requirements and Metrics" at the MeSSa workshop, which took place in Copenhagen on August 23rd, 2010.

The paper sets out an ontological approach for describing relationships between the various constituent terms that make up ‘trust’. The authors state that the trust-terms ontology proposed in the paper will help define the high-level security requirements for software architecture, thereby leading to be better defined metrics for measuring the architecture’s security and dependability.

The MeSSa workshop was co-located with the 4th European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA 2010).

The following is the abstract from the trust-terms ontology paper:

"Security and privacy, accountability and anonymity, transparency and unobservability: these terms and more are vital elements for defining the overall security requirements—and, thus, security measurability criteria—of systems. However, these distinct yet related concepts are often substituted for one another in our discussions on securing trustworthy systems and services. This is damaging since it leads to imprecise security and trust requirements. Consequently, this results in poorly defined metrics for evaluating system security. This paper proposes a trust-terms ontology, which maps out and defines the various components and concepts that comprise ICT security and trust. We can use this ontology tool to gain a better understanding of their trust and security requirements and, hence, to identify more precise measurability criteria."