For many current Internet applications, users experience a crisis of confidence. Is the website really served from the correct server or was it altered in transit? Is the Facebook invitation really originating from the claimed individual or was it created by an impostor? Is the received email from the claimed individual or was it sent by a spammer? The PI's proposed work is based on the observation that individuals often have physical interactions with resources or other individuals they communicate with. Often, people communicate over the Internet after having met in person. Similarly people visit brick-and-mortar stores and later visit their websites. The intellectual merit is that human-understandable trust establishment is a fundamental research challenge. Despite decades of research, easy-to-use and secure mechanisms that individuals can use to establish trust in Internet resources are still elusive. This exploratory work has the potential to have a transformative effect on the research directions of the community, such that the urgent crisis of confidence users are experiencing for their digital communications can be resolved. The broader impacts of the work are that achieving a high confidence for the authenticity of Internet resources is an urgent need for our society. The proposed research could provide new directions on how to address these important challenges.
CNS: EAGER: All Trust is Local: User-Oriented Trust Establishment