Trust and its Ramifications for the DoD Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)

Researchers have used a wide variety of trust definitions, leading to a plethora of meanings of the concept. But what does the word trust' mean? While most scholars provide their own definition of trust, they are dissatisfied regarding their own lack of consensus about what trust is. Trust is a cognitive function and modeling trust is an attempt to emulate the way a human assesses trust. Models of trust have been developed in an attempt to automate the logic, variables, and thought processes that a human performs when making a trust- decision. This thesis evaluates the various forms of trust and trust models. The results from our research found no such model that incorporates both mandatory and discretionary trust. A new hybrid model will be introduced, the "D-M Model." The motivation for using our model in the context of trust stems primarily from the appropriate use of discretionary and mandatory trust policies in organizations to ensure precision, consistency, and added assurance in trust. The real value of the D-M model, is that it addresses the need to model both of these types of policies explicitly and concurrently. This thesis concludes with the assessment of two practical applications of the D-M trust model as it is applied to DoD's Joint Task Forces.Naval Postgraduate School Monterey CA is the author of 'Trust and its Ramifications for the DoD Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)', published 2001 under ISBN 9781423531876 and ISBN 1423531876.