Trust book – chapter index and summary

In a previous article, I presented the publisher’s blurb for my upcoming book with Wiley, Trust in Computer Systems and the Cloud. I thought it might be interesting, this time around, to provide the chapter index of the book and to give a brief summary of what each chapter addresses.

While it’s possible to read many of the chapters on their own, I haved tried to maintain a logical progression of thought through the book, building on earlier concepts to provide a framework that can be used in the real world. It’s worth noting that the book is not about how humans trust – or don’t trust – computers (there’s a wealth of literature around this topic), but about how to consider the issue of trust between computing systems, or what we can say about assurances that computing systems can make, or can be made about them. This may sound complex, and it is – which is pretty much why I decided to write the book in the first place!

• Introduction
  • Why I think this is important, and how I came to the subject.
• Chapter 1 – Why Trust?
  • Trust as a concept, and why it’s important to security, organisations and risk management.
• Chapter 2 – Humans and Trust
  • Though the book is really about computing and trust, and not humans and trust, we need a grounding in how trust is considered, defined and talked about within the human realm if we are to look at it in our context.
• Chapter 3 – Trust Operations and Alternatives
  • What are the main things you might want to do around trust, how can we think about them, and what tools/operations are available to us?
• Chapter 4 – Defining Trust in Computing
  • In this chapter, we delve into the factors which are specific to trust in computing, comparing and contrasting them with the concepts in chapter 2 and looking at what we can and can’t take from the human world of trust.
• Chapter 5 – The Importance of Systems
  • Regular readers of this blog will be unsurprised that I’m interested in systems. This chapter examines why systems are important in computing and why we need to understand them before we can talk in detail about trust.
• Chapter 6 – Blockchain and Trust
  • This was initially not a separate chapter, but is an important – and often misunderstood or misrepresented – topic. Blockchains don’t exist or operate in a logical or computational vacuum, and this chapter looks at how trust is important to understanding how blockchains work (or don’t) in the real world.
• Chapter 7 – The Importance of Time
  • One of the important concepts introduced earlier in the book is the consideration of different contexts for trust, and none is more important to understand than time.
• Chapter 8 – Systems and Trust
  • Having introduced the importance of systems in chapter 5, we move to considering what it means to have establish a trust relationship from or to a system, and how the extent of what is considered part of the system is vital.
• Chapter 9 – Open Source and Trust
  • Another topc whose inclusion is unlikely to surprise regular readers of this blog, this chapter looks at various aspects of open source and how it relates to trust.
• Chapter 10 – Trust, the Cloud, and the Edge
  • Definitely a core chapter in the book, this addresses the complexities of trust in the modern computing environments of the public (and private) cloud and Edge networks.
• Chapter 11 – Hardware, Trust, and Confidential Computing
  • Confidential Computing is a growing and important area within computing, but to understand its strengths and weaknesses, there needs to be a solid theoretical underpinning of how to talk about trust. This chapter also covers areas such as TPMs and HSMs.
• Chapter 12 – Trust Domains
  • Trust domains are a concept that allow us to apply the lessons and frameworks we have discussed through the book to real-world situations at large scale. They also allow for modelling at the business level and for issues like risk management – introduced at the beginning of the book – to be considered more explicitly.
• Chapter 13 – A World of Explicit Trust
  • Final musings on what a trust-centric (or at least trust-inclusive) view of the world enables and hopes for future work in the field.
• References
  • List of works cited within the book.

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