A formal notion of trust – enabling reasoning about security properties

Historically, various different notions of trust can be found, each addressing particular aspects of ICT systems, e.g. trust in electronic commerce systems based on reputation and recommendation, or trust in public key infrastructures. While these notions support the understanding of trust establishment and degrees of trustworthiness in their respective application domains, they are insufficient for the more general notion of trust needed when reasoning about security in ICT systems. In this paper we present a formal definition of trust to be able to exactly express trust requirements from the view of different entities involved in the system and to support formal reasoning such that security requirements, security and trust mechanisms and underlying trust assumptions can be formally linked and made explicit. Integrated in our Security Modeling Framework this formal definition of trust can support security engineering processes and formal validation and verification by enabling reasoning about security properties w.r.t. trust.