The Importance of Trust in Computer Security

The computer security community has traditionally regarded security as a “hard” property that can be modelled and formally proven under certain simplifying assumptions. Traditional security technologies assume that computer users are either malicious, e.g. hackers or spies, or benevolent, competent and well informed about the security policies. Over the past two decades, however, computing has proliferated into all aspects of modern society and the spread of malicious software (malware) like worms, viruses and botnets have become an increasing threat. This development indicates a failure in some of the fundamental assumptions that underpin existing computer security technologies and that a new view of computer security is long overdue.