What is UTIFORO? 

UTIFORO is a project about trust in pervasive computing.  We've assembled a world class inter-disciplinary team bringing skills from the areas of social science, distributed software systems and the mathematical foundations of computation to discover deeper insights into how trust functions for people, and how it should be modelled in the computing systems around them.

Why Trust?

As we're all too aware nowadays, computing systems are crucial to our lives, and vulnerable to abuse.  If we're to continue to integrate more computing systems into our lives, then we need a way of securing the systems.  Security in computer systems used to assume that all the computers involved were owned by one administration, who would could be relied upon to allocate levels of access to the system to the various entities.  In the vision of pervasive computing, many different computing systems owned by different people will move around the world, and the hope is that these systems will work together to make our lives easier.  We believe that a centralised security manager is infeasible for this world as it doesn't fit the access models of human society, and is unlikely to scale to the billions of devices in operation.  Instead, security will be decentralised, and each security grouping will have to decide on policies about how they will interact with other security groupings.  In our society, we term the notion of what access we shall grant people to our affairs trust, and we believe that this can be carried through to the design of systems.

What new insights will UTIFORO provide?

Trust is a concept that changes depending upon the field of study, and it is difficult in building software to be certain that the system effectively provides security and risk management that is appropriate to the levels of trust of the system owners.  Our hope is that by working within an inter-disciplinary team, we can provide new insights into how trust functions, and how it can be effectively modelled.