Friday, April 20, 2012

Defining Trust

The other day I joined a Twitter discussion between Rafal Los, Wim Remes and several others over "trust". It struck us that we needed a clear definition of Trust, and that it would take more than 140 characters.

Rafal quickly put together a post, Trust - Making an intelligent, defensible trust valuation, and the debate continued. As I felt myself and Rafal were on the same page, and that some of the commenters weren't quite getting it, I was inspired to contribute a post of my own. I'm a believer in gaining understanding through examples, so I've put together a few scenarios in this post to try to drive the point home. I'd love to hear what you think. Comment here, on Rafal's post, or hit us up on Twitter.

The Question

Is trust binary? Is it a yes/no decision? All or nothing? Are there levels of trust? Go get a burbon, beer or chamomile, and we'll explore this question a bit. I'd urge you to think about this before I muddy the waters. We're not just talking about Trust as it relates to users, information security or IT vendors. There is no reason the answer to this question can't apply to social relationships and other situations.

Trust Fall, by SkinnyAndy

How do we define Trust?

There is an opportunity for trust to come into play any time we lack control over a product, a person's actions, an environment, or situation. I believe trust to be heuristic, requiring many rules that result in various levels. We see evidence of these levels in the simplest of examples: you may trust code you wrote more than that of your vendor's software; you probably trust your own network more than a partner's. I think some good examples and/or scenarios are necessary effectively define what it means to have different levels of trust. 

What should these "trust levels" be? I believe they can be formal or informal, but ultimately, they are the result of rules you use to determine "how much" you choose to trust someone or something. The ones I've come up with are completely arbitrary, and off the top of my head. One could define only two levels, or go up to ten or more. I think four is sufficient for the scenarios I present here. Yes, I realize there are actually five levels listed in the scale below. Note the zero level is not a level of trust, but the absence of it.

Sawaba's Amazing Non-Binary Trust Scale
4 - Full Trust
3 - High Trust
2 - Moderate Trust
1 - Low (initial trust; trust out of necessity or desperation)
0 - Distrust, i.e. no trust

We also need to understand how levels of trust are affected. This list is not all-inclusive, and is geared toward measuring IT products and services, to support the scenarios and examples I'll use later.

Enhancers
Detractors
Meets promises and expectations
Caught lying
Time without incident or detractors
Missed deadlines or promises
Consistancy
Mishandled or ignored vulnerabilities
Stability
Slow response to addressing issues
Quick to address issues
Inaccurate quotes
Ability to test and/or validate product
Breaches or other security incidents
Transparency
Surprise costs

Scenario 1

Purchasing a software product from a vendor. Let us assume this is a licensed, closed source software product that will install and run on servers/workstations on the local network. Though the customer in this example does not have access to the source code, they can test behavior, performance, capture network traffic, examine logs/output, etcetera.

Trust Level 0 - Haven't dealt with vendor yet. Unaware of reputation.
Trust Level 1 - Initial conversations and demo went well. "Gut check" says things are good so far.
Trust Level 2 - Checked vendor's reputation and tested product. Due diligence processes/procedures have been carried out and yielded positive results. Most people/companies are ready to do business at this "moderate" level of trust, though they may refrain from initially signing long-term contracts. Many consider this a "trial period".
Trust Level 3 - After a year or more, the vendor has "earned" a higher level of trust by consistently meeting expectations over a significant period of time. Most vendor/product relationships need not go past this level, at least by my arbitrary scale. I prefer to reserve the highest level of trust for more extreme situations where human safety and life and death are concerns. Recall, in this scenario, we don't have full control. We can't see source code, so there is always a chance a disgruntled programmer could insert a back door, for example. Perhaps over a very long period of time (10 years or more?) the level of trust could rise even higher.

Scenario 2

Using a piece of open source software.
With the services of an experienced, knowledgeable programmer trained to spot serious security vulnerabilities, stability issues, and performance concerns, a high level of trust can easily be achieved. Spend enough time reviewing and testing (especially when patches, or upgrades are released!), and it is reasonable to consider that full trust in the product could be attained.

I believe you can make the argument that, with 100% control and ability to verify/validate, we have zero need for trust in this case.

Scenario 3

A cloud service, say a Saas sales product, for example.

You can build trust based on
  • interactions with the company
  • reputation
  • a limited ability to test
  • time without incident
However, in this scenario, it is reasonable to believe that the level of trust may not pass the moderate level, due to the lack of transparency and control inherent in the model. Consider:
  • We can't see or review the source code
  • We can't see or review most of the operating environment
  • We may not know if incidents occur
  • We don't know for sure who has access to our data
  • They may say they encrypt our data, but we have no way of validating whether they do it correctly
  • Even if they are audited, and compliant with regulations designed to give assurance, we cannot put full trust in the auditors, especially with a history of varying quality and efficacy in audit practices and the auditors themselves
  • We have to take the vendor's word on the majority of items that present a risk to our data 
As a result, we might take measures to compensate for the lack of trust. To use an example, if we decide to use Dropbox, perhaps we independently encrypt all files before allowing Dropbox to sync them to compensate for a lack of trust. This is a real-world example that resulted after reports came out that many Dropbox employees had access to customer files. This was not previously clearly stated to customers, and resulted in a drop in the level of trust. These reports became a detractor.

Conclusion

There is an opportunity to trust an individual, company or product when either parties lacks control to some extent. When levels of control vary, so do levels of trust. It is therefore, not an "all or nothing" model, though both extremes (0% control and 100% control) can be experienced, and can reasonably occur.

1 comment:

  1. This is an important topic. Trust is subjective, and it is not purely binary in the calculus. But it is still a calculus that brings us to a binary decision point: is our trust confidence equal to or above a threshold we have created for the pending transaction or reliance? We identify different criteria that must be satisfied, we create metrics to be used to evaluate an asset against those criteria, and we prioritize and rank what sources we will rely upon. But the big transformation is to reject 20th century scholarship that trust is not capable of being calculated, and to begin to built the trust models, rules, metrics, and formulae that will enable us to activate our machines and applications to represent our own values in making trust decisions.

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