Came across the ”SKIMS Trust Evaluator” which is a research project researching whether the trust that two individuals put in each other can be applied to their mobile devices.

I think this could be a very interesting concept: Should my mobile device trust my best friends mobile device as much as I trust them (physically). I’m not sure that there is a real answer to this as the problem is multi-faceted. There may well be one person that I trust implicitely with all of my inner most secrets, and therefore I would have no particular concerns about their mobile device and mine having a similar trust arrangement - that is assuming that there is no malware or viruses, etc. However, with very few exceptions, your trust in people is never fully black and white. There is usually some context in which you trust someone, for some people there maybe a number of contexts for this trust, and your trust levels may vary between them.

I’m also unsure as to the practical utility of such research (interesting as it is). I can’t see why my mobile device would need to trust another device using these kind of clues, when there are already other ways of providing this capability (SSL certificates are one such thing.)

I’m also a little concerned about their research methods. They have created an Android app for collating the social network information, which then asks you to rate your trust levels with the various people as well as then mining information about conversations you have with those contacts. From this it’s difficult to see how they would turn it into any kind of practical system that could be used to establish trust.

I shall try and follow this research as it progresses and see if they can take it somewhere…