Trust and Non-person Entities: SmartData as NPE Candidate

Abstract

The identification and authentication of persons in a digital environment, and the resultant trust relationship established between proofed identity claimants and service organizations, are of topical concern to both identity claimants who require assurance that services being sourced originate with bona fide organizations, and organizations that require assurance that they are transacting with bona fide individuals, or their authorized proxies, duly identified and authenticated. Any limitation that adversely affects the believability of trust, occasioned by either party in a bilateral trust equation, or among multiple organizations in a federated trust arrangement, means that integrity of these relationships, and the extensibility of trust, become spurious.

Such is the state of digital trust issues affecting people and service organizations. By extension, similar issues obtain when describing digital trust relationships between, and among, non-person entities (NPEs) that include, but are not limited to, applications and IT infrastructure components owned and operated by organizations that have a requirement to enter into trust relationships with one another.

NPE trust requires that it be extensible so that multiple NPE objects can establish secure, and repeatable, interoperable patterns of operation between, and amongst, themselves.

SmartData, as a virtual intelligent agent that safeguards the secure storage of an individual’s personal, or proprietary, information, presents itself as an NPE candidate that may need to be identified and authenticated to other NPEs that rely on trust-based decisions.

This paper features first-look thinking on how SmartData NPEs could be used to establish trust, using several scenarios to illustrate this objective.