Trusted Information Exchange Using Trusted Network Processors

Today's systems are increasingly complex consisting of many components designed by multiple competing vendors. Trust management relies heavily on situational awareness of the operating environment, and comprehensive knowledge of components and their relationship to others. Outsourcing and modularity are necessary to reduce cost and increase manageability, but can make it difficult to gather enough information for valid trust decisions. Invalid trust assumptions could lead to vulnerabilities in the future. Furthermore, when components are integrated with information systems these difficulties can increase greatly. This paper presents how trust is applied to information systems, a trust framework based on Trusted Network Processors and an implementation of a trusted information system which allows disjointed component systems to communicate while preserving trust assumptions in a dynamically changing environment.