Trusted Party Research Articles

Online banking in an emerging market: evidence from Saudi Arabia

This paper aims to investigate and identify the adoption characteristics of online banking in one of the largest economies in the Middle East region, namely Saudi Arabia. The study is based on a questionnaire survey directly distributed to Saudi banks' customers in four major cities. The paper employs different statistical techniques such as factor analysis, multivariate analysis of variance and analysis of variance to draw the results. Eight factors including convenience, trust, difficulty, lifestyle, physical contact, complexity, reference group and third party concern are identified. Results indicate that adopters and non-adopters had varied perceptions on factors such as convenience, trust, difficulty, lifestyle, physical contact, complexity and third party concerns. The findings of this study shall enable Saudi banks to have an in-depth understanding of the factors that affect online banking adoption. Banks should refocus their efforts on customers who have not used online banking services by implementing or tailoring their marketing strategies to increase the rate of online usage. Furthermore, by enhancing online banking services, Saudi banks will be able to minimise the number of branch transactions thereby improving banking efficiency, reducing costs, gaining new clients and creating effective customer satisfaction.

Investigating the Effective Factors of Farmers’ Trust in Trainers (Case Study: Agricultural Center of Ilam Province)

The main objective of the current paper is to investigate the effective factors on the farmers’ trust in trainers using structural equation modeling. the current paper is an applied one and it is also a descriptive-survey research regarding the data gathering methods. It is a correlative study and particularly it is based on structural equation modeling. the statistical population of the study includes all the farmers, gardeners, and poultry and livestock farmers (traditional and industrial) residing in Ilam Province which adds up to 58858 people. The sampling method is multi-step random sampling method and in order to calculate the size of the sample, the maximum variance and Morgan's table were used and determined the size to be 384 participants. in order to evaluate the validity of the questionnaire, context validity method was used and the questionnaire was confirmed by ten experts. In order to evaluate the stability the Cronbach's Alpha Coefficient was calculated to be 0.8824. the results of the study show that there is a positive significant relationship among the characteristics of the trusting party (farmers), the characteristics of the trusted party (trainers) and the environmental characteristics with the farmers’ trust in trainers and all the three hypotheses of the study were confirmed.

Trusting the Untrustworthy: The Theology, Practice and Implications of Faith-Based Volunteers’ Work with Ex-Prisoners

This article analyses the nature of trust involved in mentoring ex-prisoners. Literature outlines understandings of well-placed trust as dependent upon the motivations of the trust parties, placed in those who are perceived to be trustworthy, or placed in those who have the potential to be trust-responsive. This article describes how faith-based volunteer mentors’ motivations to serve God rather than save man facilitated their bestowal of unearned trust on their ex-prisoner protégés and how this gift of trust was capable of potentiating a trustworthy response. It also describes how this proactive trust was well-placed in some who failed to be trustworthy because it encouraged open and honest communication of this failure. As a result, it argues in some circumstances it could be intelligent to place trust proactively without evidence of trustworthiness, and that trust of this kind could be especially important to people released from prison.

Privacy-Preserving Location Assurance Protocols for Mobile Applications

Location-based applications require a user's location data to provide customized services. However, location data is a sensitive piece of information that should not be revealed unless strictly necessary which induces the emerging of a number of location privacy protection methods, such as anonymity and obfuscation. However, in many applications, one needs to verify the authenticity and other properties (e.g. inclusion to an area) of location data which becomes an intractable problem because of the using of location privacy protection. How to achieve both location assurance, i.e. assuring the authenticity and other properties of location data, and location privacy protection seems to be an intangible problem without complex trusted computing techniques. By borrowing range proof techniques in cryptography, however, we achieve them both successfully with minimized trusted computing assumptions. The Pedersen commitment scheme is employed to give location data a commitment which would be used for possibly future location assurance. Area proof, testing whether a private location is within some area, is employed to test whether or not the location data having the commitment is within any definite area. Our system model do not rely on third trusted party and we give reasonable explanations for our system model and for the trusted computing assumptions. We present a new range proof protocol and a new area proof protocol which are based on a new data structure, i.e. Perfect $k$-ary Tree (PKT). Some deeper properties of PKT are presented which are used to analyze our protocols' complexity. The analysis results show that our protocols are more efficient that the former and are flexible enough to support some existing mobile applications, such as tracking services and location-based access control.

Calculative trust: Oxymoron or tautology?

The Williamsonian model of trust (Williamson, O. E. [1993]. Calculativeness, trust, and economic organization. The Journal of Law and Economics, 36, 453–486) makes the claim that the term ‘trust’ is regularly misused in social sciences research for behavioural phenomena which are better explained in terms of ‘calculativeness’. This essay explores the inescapably calculative nature of trust, organises the multiplex layers of calculative reciprocities and strategic preferences developed by trust parties and further explains how such individual and collectivised trust expectations and premises are ‘bullet-proofed’ into the self-referential and autopoietic process of the trust exchange. Humans are conditioned to calculatively trust for purposes of (economic) cooperation – a process that crucially requires the masking of calculativeness in their trust exchanges. Trust may therefore be best understood as double-blind calculativeness. Given the carefully shielded (self-)deceptive nature of trust relations – and as a conceptual and semantical consequence of such nature – it is not calculative trust, but its opposite, non-calculative trust, which is oxymoronic, i.e., a contradiction in terms.

Who Trusts Who?

Previous research on the nature of trust in an organizational context provided somewhat controversial and ambiguous results. There are both conceptual and operational difficulties in exploring this intuitively individual-level phenomenon at organizational and inter-organizational levels. The fundamental question of where trust resides in inter-organizational relationships remains unresolved. This qualitative study focuses on inter-organizational trust in dyadic business relationships. The phenomenon is approached both from the concept of the trustor and the trustee. The results suggest that the trusting party is not the organization itself, but the individuals who constitute it. Instead, the ultimate object of trust in inter-organizational settings is both individual boundary-spanners, and the organization.

Polynomial differential‐based strong ( n , t , n )‐verifiable secret sharing

Basic secret sharing schemes assume that the dealer who divides the secret and distributes shares to participants is a mutually trusted party. The basic idea of free dealer secret sharing (SS) is that each participants acts as a dealer to choose the secret (sub secrets) and generate shares for other participants and then the master secret will be combine of these subs secrets. The t -consistency of shares is a set of n shares that if any subset containing t shares defines the same secret. The author's scheme based on polynomial differential to fix the problems that had been observed Harn and Lin scheme about the security requirements for t -consistency of shares in Pedersen's (n, t, n) – SS, and consider the timeliness in Harn and Lin by using the same Pedersen's (n, t, n) – SS scheme. The author will use polynomial of degree (2t − 1) to share the sub secrets, and the polynomial differential is used for verification purpose.

Why trustworthiness in an IT vendor is important even after the vendor left: IT is accepting the message and not just the messenger that is important

Trustworthiness is the assessment that another person or others can be trusted because in the past they had shown adequate ability, integrity, and benevolence. Trust is the actual willingness to depend on the trusted party to fulfill its future obligations when there is risk that this trusted party might take undue advantage of the situation. In the current conceptualization of trust theory, trustworthiness is important because it leads to trust. Applied to the management of IT adoption and assessment, research has indeed shown that both trustworthiness and trust, often combined statistically, have a direct effect on IT adoption and assessment. There are circumstances, however, such as in this study, when the trusted party has left the scene, making its future actions and the risk of dependence on these actions irrelevant to the trusting party. The question arises whether trustworthiness still plays a role in such cases. Seemingly, at least based on the current conceptualization, this should make the trustworthiness of the trusted party an insignificant consideration. Logic is advanced why even in such a case trustworthiness may still be important, but should play an indirect role. The proposition suggested is that the trustworthiness of the messenger is important, as previously suggested, but what really counts is accepting the message this messenger conveyed. An argument is raised why in this case interpersonal justice increases trustworthiness and user acceptance of the message. The data support these propositions. Theory and managerial implications are discussed.

Privacy Preserving Association Rule Mining without Trusted Party for Horizontally Partitioned Databases

Privacy Preserving Association Rule Mining without Trusted Party for Horizontally Partitioned Databases

Financial Transaction and Fiduciary Obligation: Ethics, Economics or Commingled Commitment?

Financial transactions and fiduciary obligations are simply intertwined. Fiduciaries are subject to the principle of fidelity. It appears, at times at least, public trust in fiduciary commitments is declining as a result of fiduciaries’ selective reporting of financial events and the existence of conflicts when fiduciaries have selfish motives: motives being not always to maximize the trusting party’s value. It is the agency problem. This work attempts to enunciate that commitments and fiduciary obligations emanating from initial financial transactions are not to be violated or ignored as a matter of policy or practice. The questions that arise are: Should a fiduciary be obliged to guarantee a certain outcome for the counter-party, and should a fiduciary be held accountable to a certain type of outcome? We examine what the guidelines are or should be put in place. Initially, under the garb of some socio-religions edicts-cum-dicta, and then under the well-known economic analytics, we make our points and move the view to the forefront.

Expressiveness of a Provenance-Enabled Authorization Logic

In distributed environments, access control decisions depend on statements of multiple agents rather than only one central trusted party. However, existing policy languages put few emphasis on authorization provenances. The capability of managing these provenances is important and useful in various security areas such as computer auditing and authorization recycling. Based on our previously proposed logic, we present several case studies of this logic. By doing this, we show its expressiveness and usefulness in security arena.

Host Identity Protocol (HIP): Connectivity, Mobility, Multi-Homing, Security, and Privacy over IPv4 and IPv6 Networks

The Host Identity Protocol (HIP) is an inter-networking architecture and an associated set of protocols, developed at the IETF since 1999 and reaching their first stable version in 2007. HIP enhances the original Internet architecture by adding a name space used between the IP layer and the transport protocols. This new name space consists of cryptographic identifiers, thereby implementing the so-called identifier/locator split. In the new architecture, the new identifiers are used in naming application level end-points (sockets), replacing the prior identification role of IP addresses in applications, sockets, TCP connections, and UDP-based send and receive system calls. IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are still used, but only as names for topological locations in the network. HIP can be deployed such that no changes are needed in applications or routers. Almost all pre-compiled legacy applications continue to work, without modifications, for communicating with both HIP-enabled and non-HIP-enabled peer hosts. The architectural enhancement implemented by HIP has profound consequences. A number of the previously hard networking problems become suddenly much easier. Mobility, multi-homing, and baseline end-to-end security integrate neatly into the new architecture. The use of cryptographic identifiers allows enhanced accountability, thereby providing a base for easier build up of trust. With privacy enhancements, HIP allows good location anonymity, assuring strong identity only towards relevant trusted parties. Finally, the HIP protocols have been carefully designed to take middle boxes into account, providing for overlay networks and enterprise deployment concerns. This article provides an in-depth look at HIP, discussing its architecture, design, benefits, potential drawbacks, and ongoing work.

A secure dynamic ID based remote user authentication scheme for multi-server environment

Since the number of server providing the facilities for the user is usually more than one, the authentication protocols for multi-server environment are required for practical applications. Most of password authentication schemes for multi-server environment are based on static ID, so the adversary can use this information to trace and identify the user's requests. It is unfavorable to be applied to special applications, such as e-commerce. In this paper, we develop a secure dynamic ID based remote user authentication scheme to achieve user's anonymity. The proposed scheme only uses hashing functions to implement a robust authentication scheme for the multi-server environment. It provides a secure method to update password without the help of third trusted party. The proposed scheme does not only satisfy all requirements for multi-server environment but also achieve efficient computation. Besides, our scheme provides complete functionality to suit with the real applications.

An Anti-Counterfeiting RFID Privacy Protection Protocol

The privacy problem of many RFID systems has been extensively studied. Yet integrity in RFID has not received much attention as regular computer systems. When we evaluate an identification protocol for an RFID system for anti-counterfeiting, it is important to consider integrity issues. Moreover, many RFID systems are accessed by multiple level trust parties, which makes comprehensive integrity protection even harder. In this paper, we first propose an integrity model for RFID protocols. Then we use the model to analyze the integrity problems in Squealing Euros protocol. Squealing Euros was proposed by Juels and Pappu for RFID enabled banknotes that will support anti-forgery and lawful tracing yet preserve individual's privacy. We analyze its integrity, we then discuss the problems that arise and propose some solutions to these problems. Then an improved protocol with integrity protection for the law enforcement is constructed, which includes an unforgeable binding between the banknote serial number and the RF ciphertext only readable to law enforcement. This same protocol can be applied in many other applications which require a privacy protecting anti-counterfeiting mechanism.

Resolving the empty core: trust as a determinant of outcomes in three-party negotiations

This research examined how trust affected resource allocation in a three-party negotiation. Negotiators were presented with an empty core problem in which their theoretical share of resources exceeded the resources available for distribution. We tested which of three components of trust—reliability, predictability and empathy—predicted negotiators’ outcomes. We distinguished between absolute and relative trust. We found that relative trust was a more consistent predictor of individual outcomes than absolute trust and that the most trusted party in a network obtained the highest individual outcomes. This finding highlights the importance of social context in shaping trust judgements. The component of trust that predicted individuals’ outcomes was affected by structural power. High and low power negotiators benefited from conveying empathy (identity-based trust), whereas moderate power negotiators benefited from conveying predictability (knowledge-based trust). Low power parties also benefited from appearing unreliable (low calculus-based trust).

Managing Trust in Electronic Commerce Transactions

ABSTRACT Trust is one of the most crucial factors affecting the nature of operations and transactions in information networks. Lack of trust in computerized transactions is one of the main obstacles to increase of electronic commerce. Indeed, effective systems are needed for analyzing and predicting various elements of trust to be used in computerized decision making. This article corresponds to this need by suggesting a formal model for systems managing trust in computerized transactions via networks. The evaluation of trust and computerized decision making of this model are based on credentials and algorithms evaluating these credentials. Credentials are parameters measuring and characterizing various elements of trust. Credentials of the model characterize and measure predictability and competence of the trusted party. The model also deploys directly trusted credentials measuring one's own experience of the trusting party, and recommended credentials issued by a third party.

Political Cynicism And Third Party Support In American Presidential Elections

Recent scholarship on American voting behavior contends that political cynicism prompts citizens to support a third party candidate. I maintain this research fails to consider an alternative direction of causality between political trust and third party support. Using an exogenous measure of political trust, one uncontaminated by candidate preference, analysis demonstrates that political cynicism is shaped by preference for an American third party rather than being causally prior to that preference. Students of American electoral behavior must consider the possibility that major third party candidacies shape supporters’ political orientations and concerns in much the same manner as the major political parties do.

AN ATTRIBUTIONAL IMPETUS MODEL OF TRUST DEVELOPMENT.

This paper presents a new model of the trust development process. The attributional impetus model builds on the traditional, incremental model, which dominates current theoretical conceptions of trust (Kramer, 1999), by providing conceptual logic for trusting choices that are not incremental but instead may appear to be excessive and potentially dangerous for the trusting party. This new model focuses on the complex, motivated psychological states of the parties who might develop or increase their mutual trust. It builds from Emerson's (1962) theory of power dependence and Murnighan, Oesch, and Pillutla's (2000) model of self-impression management. As the name implies, it focuses on individuals' attributional processes--the attributions they make about their own and their counterpart's behaviors as well as the attributions they seek to encourage--as the basic causal forces in trust development. A key element in the model is the notion that each party in a trust relationship views the interaction and the c...

An Optimal Probabilistic Protocol for Synchronous Byzantine Agreement

Broadcasting guarantees the recipient of a message that everyone else has received the same message. This guarantee no longer exists in a setting in which all communication is person-to-person and some of the people involved are untrustworthy: though he may claim to send the same message to everyone, an untrustworthy sender may send different messages to different people. In such a setting, Byzantine agreement offers the "best alternative" to broadcasting. Thus far, however, reaching Byzantine agreement has required either many rounds of communication (i.e., messages had to be sent back and forth a number of times that grew with the size of the network) or the help of some external trusted party. In this paper, for the standard communication model of synchronous networks in which each pair of processors is connected by a private communication line, we exhibit a protocol that, in probabilistic polynomial time and without relying on any external trusted party, reaches Byzantine agreement in an expected constant number of rounds and in the worst natural fault model. In fact, our protocol successfully tolerates that up to 1/3 of the processors in the network may deviate from their prescribed instructions in an arbitrary way, cooperate with each other, and perform arbitrarily long computations. Our protocol effectively demonstrates the power of randomization and zero-knowledge computation against errors. Indeed, it proves that "privacy" (a fundamental ingredient of one of our primitives), even when is not a desired goal in itself (as for the Byzantine agreement problem), can be a crucial tool for achieving correctness. Our protocol also introduces three new primitives---graded broadcast, graded verifiable secret sharing, and oblivious common coin---that are of independent interest, and may be effectively used in more practical protocols than ours.

Group-oriented (t, n) threshold digital signature scheme and digital multisignature

The paper presents group-oriented (t,n) threshold digital signature schemes based on the difficulty of solving the discrete logarithm problem. By employing these schemes, any t out of n users in a group can represent this group to sign the group signature. The size of the group signature and the verification time of the group signature are equivalent to that of an individual digital signature. In other words, the (t, n) threshold signature scheme has the following five properties: (i) any group signature is mutually generated by at least t group members; (ii) the size of the group signature is equivalent to the size of an individual signature; (iii) the signature verification process is simplified because there is only one group public key required; (iv) the group signature can be verified by any outsider; and (v) the group holds the responsibility to the signed message. In addition to the above properties, two of the schemes proposed do not require the assistance of a mutually trusted party. Each member selects its own secret key and the group public key is determined by all group members. Each group member signs a message separately and sends the individual signature to a designated clerk. The clerk validates each individual signature and then combines all individual signatures into a group signature. The (n, n) threshold signature scheme can be easily extended to become a digital multisignature scheme.< >