The Internet is increasingly removing us from a familiar, face-to-face
style of doing business. We may now be conducting business online
with people or organisations we have never met, and perhaps
never heard of before.
It can be difficult to assess whether the information received
on the Internet is accurate and up-to-date, and to detect information
that has been deliberately falsified. Organisations involved
in e-commerce also face the challenge of building online systems
and online customer relationships which engender trust.
Our trust management research focuses on two areas:
- Investigating the factors which influence
users’ trust in web sites and e-commerce and developing
an understanding of the strategies that can be used to communicate
trustworthiness.
- Investigating ways to include company logos
and trust measures in digital certificates.
Displaying certified company logos in the web browser allows web
site authentication to be done at a glance without the extra mouse
clicks needed to view certificates. The trust measure allows organisations
to have their own web root certificate in which they put high
trust in contrast to less trustworthy standard web certificates.
This means that trust measures can be displayed to users and can
be taken into account by applications for automatic decision making.
Specific areas of investigation are:
- Develop a trust inference engine for automatic assessment of
trust structures in computer networks. Investigate the factors
which influence users trust in e-commerce web sites.
- Investigate to what degree the human phenomenon of trust can
be modelled by testing how well belief theoretic inference corresponds
with human intuition.
- Investigate to what degree trust can be
considered transitive.
- Develop guidelines for people and organisations
to express trust in each other by using a mathematical trust
metric.
- Study system interfaces such as the web
browser in order to determine which security relevant evidence
is appropriate and how it can best be presented.
Because trust and belief are very general concepts, outcomes of
this research should not only be beneficial to IT security but
will be applicable in a multitude of areas such as Artificial
Intelligence, web site development and e-commerce, reliability
analysis, risk analysis and decision making.
Contact Point:
Dr Audun Josang
Phone 07 3864 1051
Email
ajosang@dstc.edu.au
Staff:
Dr Audun Josang - DSTC
Mr Simon Pope - DSTC
