Trust in Computing and the Cloud

I usually write and post articles first thing in the morning, before starting work, but today is different. For a start, I’m officially on holiday (so definitely not planning to write any code for Enarx, oh no), and second, I decided that today would be the day that I should finish my book, if I could.

Towards the end of 2019, I signed a contract with Wiley to write a book (which, to be honest, I’d already started) on trust. There’s lots of literature out there on human trust, organisational trust and how humans trust each other, but despite a growing interest in concepts such as zero trust, precious little on how computer systems establish and manage trust relationships to each other. I decided it was time to write a book on this, and also on how trust works (or maybe doesn’t) in the Cloud. I gave myself a target of 125,000 words, simply by looking at a couple of books at the same sort of level and then doing some simple arithmetic around words per page and number of pages. I found out later that I’d got it a bit wrong, and this will be quite a long book – but it turns out that the book that needed writing (or that I needed to write, which isn’t quite the same thing) was almost exactly this long, as when I finished around 1430 GMT today, I found that I was at 124,939 words. I have been tracking it, but not writing to the target, given that my editor told me that I had some latitude, but I’m quite amused by how close it was.

Anyway, I emailed my editor on completion, who replied (despite being on holiday), and given that I’m 5 months or so ahead of schedule, he seems happy (I think they prefer early to late).

I don’t have many more words in me today, so I’m going to wrap up here, but do encourage you to read articles on this blog labelled with “trust”, several of which are edited excerpts from the book. I promise I’ll keep you informed as I get information about publication dates, etc.

Keep safe and have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, or whatever you celebrate.

Author: Mike Bursell

Long-time Open Source and Linux bod, distributed systems security, etc.. CEO of Profian. マイク・バーゼル： オープンソースとLinuxに長く従事。他にも分散セキュリティシステムなども手がける。現在Profianのチーフセキュリティアーキテクト View all posts by Mike Bursell