The trust matrix

We hear a great many people talk about what a trust architecture will prevent. A lot less about what it can enable.

Seems to me that running a network for information - some of which has considerable personal or exchangeable value - without any kind of integrity mechanisms in place is rather like trying to run an economy without a reliable currency.

Sure, there are numerous things you can do without reliable identity of a user and their machine. Just as you can barter physical goods in the marketplace without money in your pocket.

But there are other things which are enabled via a hardened trust system. Techie types of things, like making sure network access is properly and reliably authenticated and that spyware isn't running alongside an application; economic ones, like making transactions enforceable; and personal ones, like making sure your resume isn't treated by someone else as if it was not confidential information.

So the architecture of trust - and I use the term broadly to include not just the hardened system, but the software applications which run within it - which in and of itself appears to be a rather dull set of building blocks and software stacks, actually allows the networks' users to glean all kinds of optional benefits in the use, storage and exchange of information.

Which tangibly changes the way we use the network and the society which operates through it.