Initial Trust Establishment Research Articles

Do you wanna dance? Tales of trust and driving trust factors in robot medication counseling in the pharmacy context.

Introduction: The sustainable implementation of socially assistive robots in a pharmacy setting requires that customers trust the robot. Our aim was to explore young adults' anticipations of and motives for trusting robot medication counseling in a high-stakes scenario. Methods: Through a co-creation approach, we co-designed a prototype application for the Furhat platform together with young adults. In-lab testing of a pharmacy scenario, where the robot provides medication counseling related to emergency contraceptive pills, was conducted to deepen our understanding of some factors driving young adults' initial trust establishment and anticipations of interacting with a robot in a high-stakes scenario. Qualitative data from interviews with six study participants were analyzed using inductive, reflexive thematic analysis and are presented through a narrative approach. Results: We outline five tales of trust characterized by personas. A continuum of different anticipations for consulting a robot in medication counseling is presented, ranging from low to high expectations of use. Driving factors in the initial trust establishment process are position, autonomy, boundaries, shame, gaze, and alignment. Discussion: The article adds to the understanding of the dimensions of the multifaceted trust concept, of driving trust factors, and of the subsequent anticipation to trust robots in a high-stakes pharmacy context.

Location Based Handshake and Private Proximity Test with Location Tags

A location proximity test service allows mobile users to determine whether they are in close proximity to each other, and has found numerous applications in mobile social networks. Unfortunately, existing solutions usually reveal much of users’ private location information during a proximity test. They are also vulnerable to location cheating where an attacker reports false locations to gain an advantage. Moreover, the initial trust establishment among unfamiliar users in large scale mobile social networks has been a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme that enables a user to perform (1) a location based handshake that establishes secure communications among strangers, who do not have a pre-shared secret, and (2) a privacy-preserving proximity test without revealing the user’s actual location to the server or other users not within the proximity. The proposed scheme is based on a novel concept, i.e., spatial-temporal location tags, and we put forward a location tag construction method using environmental signals that provides an unforgeable location proof. We use Bloom filters to efficiently represent users’ location tags and vicinity regions. We exploit fuzzy extractor, a lightweight cryptographic primitive, to extract shared secrets between matching location tags. We conduct extensive analysis, simulation, and real experiments to demonstrate the feasibility, security, and efficiency of our scheme.

Initial trust formation in Virtual Organisations

We present a conceptual framework that introduces key concepts capturing initial trust establishment in on-demand Virtual Organisations (VO). This framework can be used to develop trust formation protocols and policies. The framework can serve as a basis for implementing an automated system that facilitates the establishment of a VO, considerably reduces the effort for setting up a VO and consequently reduces the VO's time to operation. A novel aspect of the initial trust establishment described in this paper is the consideration of the mutual trust effects of the participants' behaviour during the trust negotiation process.

Highly reliable trust establishment scheme in ad hoc networks

Securing ad hoc networks in a fully self-organized way is effective and light-weight, but fails to accomplish trust initialization in many trust deficient scenarios. To overcome this problem, this paper aims at building well established trust relationships in ad hoc networks without relying on any pre-defined assumption. We propose a probabilistic solution based on distributed trust model. A secret dealer is introduced only in the system bootstrapping phase to complement the assumption in trust initialization. With it, much shorter and more robust trust chains are able to be constructed with high probability. A fully self-organized trust establishment approach is then adopted to conform to the dynamic membership changes. The simulation results on both static and dynamic performances show that our scheme is highly resilient to dynamic membership changing and scales well. The lack of initial trust establishment mechanisms in most higher level security solutions (e.g. key management schemes, secure routing protocols) for ad hoc networks makes them benefit from our scheme.