Geoff Huston discusses the call for papers I recently recommended.

Trust and networking go hand in hand, and I'm pleased to see that the topic of trust has been raised by the Internet Society recently.

In this column I'd like to informally respond to this call for participation and revise some earlier thoughts I had on trust to see if we've made any significant progress on the issue of trust in the Internet in the past four years.

Jumping to the end:

So is trust the universal answer?

The problem for me is that "trust" is not that much different from blind faith, and, in that light, "trust”"is not a very satisfying answer. The difference between "fortuitous trust" and "misplaced trust" is often just a matter of pure luck, and that’s just not good enough for a useful and valuable network infrastructure. "Trust" needs to be replaced with the capability for deterministic validation of actions and outcomes of network-based service transactions. In other words, what is needed is less trust and better security.