In security engineering, a trusted component of a system is a component that has the ability to violate the system’s security guarantees. For instance, if a security engineer says “Alice is trusted to guard the cookie jar”, that means “Alice has the ability to render the cookie jar unguarded”.
I notice that the four examples at the beginning of this post all seem to slot pretty nicely into this definition:
“I decided to trust her” ⇒ I assigned Alice to guard the cookie jar by herself
“Should I trust him?” ⇒ Should I allow Bob to guard the cookie jar?
“Trust me” ⇒ Please allow me to access the cookie jar
“They offered me their trust” ⇒ They granted me access to the cookie jar
If you think about them as being about security policies, rather than epistemic states, then they seem to make a lot more sense.
I think the layperson’s informal concept of “trust” is more muddled than this, and conflates “I’m giving you the power to violate my security” with “I am comfortable with you having the power to violate my security” and maybe some other stuff.
Oh, this actually feels related to my relational-stance take on this. When I decide to trust a friend, colleague or romantic partner, I’m giving them the power to hurt me in some way (possibly psychologically). There’s practical versions of this, but part of it is something like “we are choosing to be the sort of people who going to share secrets and vulnerabilities to each other.”
This is also just another way of saying “willing to be vulnerable” (from my answer below) or maybe “decision to be vulnerable”. Many of these answers are just saying the same thing in different words.
In security engineering, a trusted component of a system is a component that has the ability to violate the system’s security guarantees. For instance, if a security engineer says “Alice is trusted to guard the cookie jar”, that means “Alice has the ability to render the cookie jar unguarded”.
I notice that the four examples at the beginning of this post all seem to slot pretty nicely into this definition:
“I decided to trust her” ⇒ I assigned Alice to guard the cookie jar by herself
“Should I trust him?” ⇒ Should I allow Bob to guard the cookie jar?
“Trust me” ⇒ Please allow me to access the cookie jar
“They offered me their trust” ⇒ They granted me access to the cookie jar
If you think about them as being about security policies, rather than epistemic states, then they seem to make a lot more sense.
I think the layperson’s informal concept of “trust” is more muddled than this, and conflates “I’m giving you the power to violate my security” with “I am comfortable with you having the power to violate my security” and maybe some other stuff.
Oh, this actually feels related to my relational-stance take on this. When I decide to trust a friend, colleague or romantic partner, I’m giving them the power to hurt me in some way (possibly psychologically). There’s practical versions of this, but part of it is something like “we are choosing to be the sort of people who going to share secrets and vulnerabilities to each other.”
This is also just another way of saying “willing to be vulnerable” (from my answer below) or maybe “decision to be vulnerable”. Many of these answers are just saying the same thing in different words.