Trustworthiness Model Representation
manufacturing, where (product) safety may
be more important.
I NTRODUCTION
Trust is a desired attribute of all connected
systems in business. But with the advent of
mission-critical Industrial Internet of Things
(IIoT) systems that control the production of
a company’s final output to their customers,
the importance of a trusted system has been
magnified: Without a trustworthy system, a
business cannot have confidence that it will
meet its customers’ needs, its legal and
regulatory obligations, and, ultimately, its
business objectives.
Core aspects of measuring and reporting
trustworthiness include 1) providing model
users with near real-time visibility into the
IIoT system status, 2) providing assurance
that the system is operating according to
specifications as well as providing immediate
information on changes to the system, 3)
providing
certification
of
the
trustworthiness and authenticity of new
system components as they are added to a
growing infrastructure and 4) providing a
record of how the system status has changed
over time.
Trustworthiness is defined by the Industrial
Internet Consortium (IIC) 1 to be a composite
of attributes of safety, security, privacy,
reliability and resilience. This is an essential
definition for “what” trust is in the context
of an IIoT system. These individual
characteristics of a trusted system are
interdependent and, at times, inversely
related. As such, measuring trustworthiness
can be very subjective based on the specific
goals of an organization and the implicit
trade-offs it has made. For an effective
approach to ‘how” an organization actually
implements
a
policy
to
ensure
trustworthiness, it is imperative that a model
for measuring trustworthiness must be both
rigorous as well as pragmatic, able to
address the specific operating concerns of
each organization. For example, a systemic
measure of trustworthiness may rely more
heavily on security attributes in a large,
distributed industrial environment such as
energy production, than in an access-
controlled production facility such as food
Creating
a
robust
yet
practical
Trustworthiness Model must therefore
account for the context of the operating
environment of the system itself and the
unique priorities of the organization. And it
must be intuitive and actionable so that
organizations will come to rely on its
usefulness, rather than
seeing a
Trustworthiness Model as an interesting yet
academic measure with limited value to
daily operations.
B ACKGROUND
Trustworthiness Defined
An IIoT system needs to be trustworthy in
order to gain the trust of its users. According
to the Oxford English Dictionary, trust is
defined as a “firm belief in the reliability,
truth, ability, or strength of someone or
something.” While trust is a logical
evaluation of someone or something, it is
1
The Industrial Internet Vocabulary Report, page 21, https://www.iiconsortium.org/pdf/IIC_Vocab_Technical_Report_2.1.pdf,
2018.
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IIC Journal of Innovation