Introduction and Preview
In this chapter, the author first sketches the context in which the topic of this book should be considered. In a society which is becoming more complex and interconnected at a very fast rate, the notions of trust and security are of ever greater importan
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Introduction and Preview
1.1 Introduction 1.1.1 Trust and Security in a Modern World Trust is a sociological concept expressing the positive belief that a person or a system we interact with will behave as expected. In our day-to-day life, we constantly and often implicitly put our trust in other parties, e.g.: • When we drive a car, we trust that the car will function as expected, that the brakes will work and that the car goes right when we turn the steering wheel right. We also trust that the other people driving cars around us are qualified to drive a car and are paying attention to traffic. • When we deposit our money in a bank account, we trust that the bank will keep the money safe. • When we send someone a letter, we trust the postal services to deliver the letter in a timely manner to the right person, and to keep the letter closed such that no one else can read its content. • When we buy something in a shop, we trust the shop owner to deliver the product, e.g. when we pay in advance, and that we receive the genuine product we paid for. On the other hand, the shop owner trusts that we will pay for all products we carry out. In the majority of situations, such trust-based interactions work out in the right way, because the parties we interact with are trustworthy. In fact, our entire complex society is based on such trust relations between people and systems, and it would not last very long if no one or no thing could be trusted. However, we don’t live in an ideal world, and it would be very naive to think that everyone is intrinsically trustworthy. Many parties have external motives to behave in a trustworthy manner, e.g. the shop and the bank won’t get many customers when they cannot be trusted, and the other car owners will primarily drive carefully for their own safety. Some parties cannot be trusted at all; we immediately think of R. Maes, Physically Unclonable Functions, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-41395-7_1, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
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criminals and terrorists, but this can also include e.g., disgruntled employees, envious colleagues or nosy neighbors, or even normally honest people who are tempted to abuse a situation when it presents itself. We need systems that induce, guarantee or even enforce trustworthiness of parties in our non-ideal world. This is what we call security, i.e. security is a means to enable trust. In the past, and to a large extent still today, security is either based on physical protection and prevention measures, on observation and detection of untrusted elements, or on legal and other reprimands of trust violations, and often on a combination of these techniques. For example, in order to keep its (your) money secure, a bank will store it in a vault (physical protection). The access to this vault is moreover strictly limited to the bank’s employees and protocols are in place to keep other people away (detection). Finally, by law, trying to rob a bank is also a criminal act for which one will be prosecuted if caught (legal reprimands
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