A Short Introduction into Trustworthiness
System Characteristics to support a system’s
business purpose and to ensure that
functions perform adequately without
compromise. The five characteristics are:
safety, security, reliability, resilience and
privacy. A similar list of “dimensions” was
created in 1999 by the Committee on
Information Systems Trustworthiness to
describe the trustworthiness of networked
information systems (NIS). 4 In early 2016, IIC
adapted the term to its own list of five
characteristics, defining the core of
trustworthiness. Contemporaneously, NIST
also reintroduced the term based on the
same characteristics. 5 In addition to the
The
Cambridge
Dictionary
defines
trustworthy as deserving of trust, or able to
be trusted. 1 In the context of an industrial
system or a component used for an
industrial system, trustworthiness means
that a subject deserves trust or is able to be
trusted. But what is trust? The dictionary
says trust is to have confidence in something,
or to believe in someone, 2 but this lacks
technical guidelines, so the Industrial
Internet Consortium (IIC) has refined the
definition, as described here.
The
Industrial
Internet
Reference
3
Architecture (IIRA) designated five Key
Figure 1: Trustworthiness Characteristics and Threats
1 Cambridge Dictionary, Cambridge University Press, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/trustworthy
2 Cambridge Dictionary, Cambridge University Press, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/trust
3
Industrial Internet Consortium:
https://www.iiconsortium.org/IIRA.htm
Industrial
Internet
Reference
Architecture
(IIRA),
V1.8,
January
4
2017.
Schneider, Fred B. (Editor), Committee on Information Systems: Trustworthiness: Trust in Cyberspace, National Academic Press,
Washington D.C., 1999, retrieved 2016-09-26 http://www.nap.edu/catalog/6161/trust-in-cyberspace
5
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Information Technology Laboratory, Glossary: Trustworthiness,
https://csrc.nist.gov/Glossary/?term=2283 and https://csrc.nist.gov/Glossary/?term=2284
September 2018
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