Traditional trust mechanisms no longer work?
As we become more dependent on the Internet, we can never be 100% sure that everything is correct and as it should be. This might relate to receiving an email from someone who says that they know you, but how can you tell if the person is genuine? The email address looks fine, but the email content does not have the same writing style as the person who normally writes from that email address. Unfortunately there is very little that we can do, at present, to determine if this is genuine, but things are changing, and it is trust that is becoming the key element of how we interact with the Web.
Bruce Schneier highlights this, in that we are entering a new phase, and defines that:
Trust and cooperation are the first problems we had to solve before we could become a social species. In the 21st century, they have become the most important problems we need to solve — again. Our global society has become so large and complex that our traditional trust mechanisms no longer work.
Our existing trust infrastructure — the PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) — is not really fit for purpose, as we rely on centralised entity to create the trust. With Kerberos we setup our own trust server, and register the verify the entities we trust.
