Today, regarding Digital Trust, everything is connected. From remote workforces to refrigerators, more and more of what we use and interact with connects to everything else. Devices are the internet, the internet is mobile apps, cars are computers, doctor visits are virtual, and entertainment is streaming content. In other words, the line between digital and real no longer exists.
In this landscape of ubiquitous connection, trust is the foundation that enables digital communication. Interactions between systems, devices, and users take on many forms and exist simultaneously in real and virtual spaces, woven throughout an increasingly complex global network. Traditional digital security is still important, but encryption alone isn’t enough.
For the real connected world to communicate and function, we need a much more flexible and reliable architecture that incorporates technology, standards, and practices into a comprehensive system of digital trust. The notion of trust between two points in a digital connection is as old as digital communication itself. But too often, there’s been a disconnect between the technology and the ideal.
The principles of trust have lacked harmonious hardware and software solutions, and vice versa. It’s worth mentioning that given the ever-evolving cloud computing technology landscape, a truly defined digital trust is equal parts concept, processes, and tools. In other words, it’s the point at which digital technology and the ideals of trust meet to deliver value and meaningful impact.
Understanding What Digital Trust Entails In The Real World
Digital Trust is the framework, software, and practices that enable confidence between the digital world and businesses, governments, consortia, and individuals. One thing is sure: built on proven technology, Digital Trust without underlying technology is simply a mantra. Deploying it in the real world requires systems that enable secure connections across the vast and complex landscape.
Notably, consumers are increasingly concerned about digital trust, and many will take their business elsewhere if they don’t receive it. In such cases, we can say that Digital Trust is the level of confidence users have in the security, privacy, and integrity of digital technology, interactions, and transactions. It’s a crucial tool in cloud services, collaborative efforts, and digital economies.
One way to look at the Digital Trust is when working with the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) as a foundation. On that note, the Public Key Infrastructure has been proven for decades to secure websites. Over the years, as the connected world evolved, digital security experts realized that the same proven technology used to encrypt websites also verifies digital identity while authenticating data.
Eventually, some of the website encryption certificates can be issued to nearly any digital object from networks to emails, code to documents, and even users and devices. By its very nature, the Public Key Infrastructure provides encryption, integrity, and identity to digital connections, which is why it stands as a fundamental component of digital trust — one ready to meet any challenge.
Deploying A Flexible And Automated Digital Trust Infrastructure
More than just simple encryption, the Public Key Infrastructure helps bind the identity to a key through a signing process. The signature is issued by the root, so anyone with the public key to that root knows the signature bound to the PKI certificate is valid and trusted. In some cases, that root is public — it’s been distributed to a trust store housed by a web browser like Chrome or Firefox.
A public root may also include an Operating System (OS) like Windows or MacOS. In other cases, the root is private — trusted by whatever systems an organization wants to use internally or within a small group of companies. For your information, the Cryptography is the same either way, but the ability to deploy both public and private options makes PKI especially versatile.
As a result of the seamless cryptographic mechanism flexibility in the Digital Trust infrastructure, the Public Key Infrastructure helps bridge the gap between public and private trust. This makes it powerful and secure enough to be trusted as the private encryption and identity solution for many nations’ governments, and equally as the public solution for consumer IoT (smart) devices.
It’s important to realize that the proof of Digital Trust is all around us. However, not just any other technology will deliver on the Digital Trust mandates. By all means, for Digital Trust to work in the real world, connections must possess certain qualities that run on proven security software and protocols. Some of these qualities may encompass the three principles of secure connections.
Including:
- Identity: Individuals, businesses, machines, workloads, containers, services, and anything else that connects must be authenticated with a cryptographically unique identity.
- Integrity: Objects must be used and transmitted with tamper prevention, as well as tools for verifying that the object hasn’t been altered.
- Encryption: In this case, it means that the innovative data must be secured in transit.
In today’s ever-evolving technology ecosystems, marketplace professionals need to be able to secure a website alongside an application platform. Or rather, to securely sign a document while authenticating an employee’s smartphone. A company may need a solution for automated robots on the manufacturing line while another may need to protect its customers’ credit card numbers.
A solution that works one way but not another, or one day but not the next, not only burdens the IT team responsible for managing security, it also puts the organization at risk. Fortunately, unlike other types of security solutions, the Public Key Infrastructure is incredibly flexible. The PKI heavily relies on asymmetric key pairs, and the security process can encrypt just as easily as validate.
Examining The Essential Pillars In The Digital Trust Framework
The Digital Trust Framework should be used as a decision-making guide for leaders at the highest levels when considering the development, use or application of digital technologies and services. It defines shared goals or values that inform the concept of digital trust, as well as dimensions against which the trustworthiness of digital technologies can be operationalized and evaluated.
On the one hand, in most organizations, the Digital Trust Framework defines shared goals or values that inform the actual concept. This includes security, reliability, accountability, oversight, inclusive, ethical, and responsible use. On the other hand, the framework also defines dimensions against which the trustworthiness of digital technologies can be operationalized and evaluated.
Including:
- Cybersecurity
- Safety
- Transparency
- Interoperability
- Auditability
- Redressability
- Fairness
- Privacy
An examination of the goals and demands motivating digital trust as well as the capabilities needed to operationalize them is essential. By doing so, leaders can make better, more trustworthy decisions regarding technology.
At its core, digital trust responds to the needs of the connected landscape, defends against threats, and anticipates the growth and evolution of digital technologies. To do this, digital trust operates on the following essential pillars:
A. A Body Of Tech Standards
Leading experts and organizations that define the protocols, technologies, and identity requirements for digital trust. For example, the CA/Browser Forum defines standards for TLS/SSL certificates and a common framework to certify identities and encryption across the web.
B. Compliance And operations
Compliance is the set of policies and continuous audits that verify that operations are being conducted according to the exacting standards set by a governing body. Operations, with data centers at their core, verify certificate status through OCSP or other protocols.
C. Certificate Lifecycle Management
Software that provides centralized visibility and control over digital certificate lifecycles for public and/or private trust within an organization.
D. Delivery Across All Ecosystems
Extension of trust into complex supply chains, across device lifecycles, into a content community’s digital rights provenance, and any other space where an object connects.
Technically, the Public Key Infrastructure can be deployed in any number of environments to secure a wide range of connections. PKI solutions can scale down or up, run in the Cloud, on-prem or hybrid, secure web and email today, then BYOD and IoT tomorrow. It’s one solution for any number of security needs.
Some Notable Applications By Industry Worth Mentioning
It’s worth mentioning that even the engineers and security experts behind the Web Tech Experts Cloud Computing Solutions are often amazed by the creative ways people use digital trust. In other words, like a thread woven through seemingly disparate modern technologies and unrelated industries, digital trust is at the heart of how we communicate, navigate, and work in the real world.
1: The Aviation Hubs
1.1: Smooth takeoff, safe landing
In industries with complex ecosystems, where there are a lot of connecting parts with limitations on the power of devices and variation amongst the types of devices, there’s a need for an adaptable, reliable security solution. In the case of air travel, all these factors come into play, but there’s also a need for data confidentiality. The information transmitted between ground and plane must be secured, just as the device itself must be secured, to prevent what could be catastrophic tampering.
With digital trust solutions protecting these devices and the data they transmit, pilots and towers can safely and securely gather, communicate, and use a variety of information to ensure planes take off and land safely. This is regardless of the plane or the airport. If it’s on AeroMACS standard, it works the same — and just as reliably — in a small airport in the United States as it does at a major airport in Australia.
For instance, to help in deployment, DigiCert Solutions protects the AeroMACS network, the standard for aeronautical communication that will soon be used by nearly every airport worldwide. The primary need here is authentication. With thousands of flights in the air, airports, airlines, and pilots rely on AeroMACS to guarantee the safe and on-time travel of millions of people every day.
2: The Supply Chains
2.1: Identity for every link
Imagine trying to locate a single shipping container — one of millions — as it travels from one port to another, between continents, and across oceans. Now imagine trying to locate that single shipping container using databases and cargo logs. The global supply chain is like a complicated clock — each cog, spring, and wheel needs to be in its place, working as designed, for the mechanism to function. Shipping delays slow down the entire chain. Missing shipments can break the chain and cost companies money — both in the loss of materials and the loss of revenue.
2.2: Digital line of sight
More than 11 billion tons of goods move by sea every year. Today, there are more than 50,000 container ships in the world. The scale of ocean commerce is massive, but it’s also dynamic. The movement is constant, with freighters dotting the globe like a map of a starry night sky. For as many ships as there are on the water, there are even more containers.
Locating and tracking each of these containers in real-time — and securely — is a monumental undertaking. The challenge with shipping at this scale is in mutually authenticating devices in the field to the Cloud, where assets are tracked. If compromised, the shipping company can lose sight of the location of the containers, or false information about the containers can be sent to the company.
To be effective, a security solution must not only secure the device but also the information in transit. It also needs to be scalable, and capable of securing tens of thousands of devices at once without fail.
3: The Shipping Networks
3.1: Any lane, anywhere in the world
With digital trust, shipping containers can be securely tracked throughout the length of their journey from launch to the port of destination, no matter the number of shipments or where they are in the world. This means a decrease in the chance of theft or loss, and it helps to ensure efficient movement of goods from port to port. Plus the deployment process is also worldwide.
At the heart of the global supply chain, connected shipping containers move goods and materials to every continent on the planet. The primary need here is also authentication. More than simple tracking, DigiCert solutions deliver real-time, secured authentication so the company can locate and identify the device attached to each shipping container.
4: The Global Workforces
4.1: Any user, anywhere, any time
In some cases, managing the size of a company is as much a challenge as managing what that company produces. For instance, how does one organization secure individual users who are not only working in different roles in different offices all around the globe—but also on different devices using different operating systems and applications—many of them BYOD? For IBM, this wasn’t just an intellectual exercise.
It was a real problem, one that they had to solve long before the COVID-19 Pandemic forced countless more organizations into remote workforce solutions. Still, thousands of offices located across the globe run the business of a longtime global leader in hardware and software. With critical operations on the line, PKI delivers a solution for authenticating, securing, and identifying half a million employee users spread all around the world.
4.2: Bring your own anything
The crucial task here is to authenticate, identify, and secure the huge number of users. Here, the term “flexible and scalable” couldn’t just be a theoretical description — it needed to be the real-world function of a working digital trust solution. But even as the number of users presents a challenge, the number of types of devices and applications those users run and bring to work presents an equal — if not greater — challenge.
This may be a company-owned laptop, a personal smartphone, or an old iPad. If you want to give your employees, vendors, and contractors the flexibility to use the devices that make their work easier, but you don’t want to introduce vulnerabilities into your network, you need a security solution that’s adaptive but robust.
In this case, flexibility and scalability are crucial, and these attributes are fundamental parts of digital trust. Here, IBM was able to use digital trust solutions to authenticate any number of devices, regardless of who owns them or what they’re running, while also simultaneously authenticating multiple devices for hundreds of thousands of users, no matter where they are. To the users — all 500,000 of them — it’s entirely seamless.
5: The Healthcare Sectors
5.1: Trust at the medical centers
For most of us, digital devices offer convenience. A Bluetooth connection allows us to check the current temperature and humidity on the back patio. A Wi-Fi connection between an iPad in the kitchen and a smart TV in the living room lets us pick up an episode where we left off while getting dinner in the oven. That connection is something we enjoy, but most of the time, it’s not something we need. But for some people, that connection means the difference between life and death.
A few years ago, medical engineers unveiled a new form of pacemaker. This particular model was “smart.” By connecting via Bluetooth to an external monitor and app on the patient’s phone, the pacemaker could not only deliver the electrical signals needed to keep the heart running, it could also tell the patient and the doctor how the pacemaker is functioning. Is the pacemaker working the way it should? How’s the battery life?
This data used to require a visit to the hospital, and sometimes surgery to determine or correct. Now, it could all be monitored, recorded, and communicated automatically and continuously. Connected pacemakers are not simply a convenience. Thousands of people rely on their devices to keep them alive. But as with any connection, there’s the possibility of interference. For people with these pacemakers, the need for digital trust is critical and very real.
5.2: When “life or death” is literal
In August 2017, an unusual headline hit the newswires—unusual, at least, for anyone who doesn’t work in the IoT world. The United States Food and Drug Administration was “recalling” several pacemakers due to a cybersecurity threat. In what sounded like another story about internet hacking risks, the FDA warned that certain pacemakers might “be vulnerable to cybersecurity intrusions and exploits.”
It was a strange idea, something that sounded like the plot of a science fiction movie. Could a hacker break into someone’s pacemaker and cause it to stumble or fail? Yes. As medical device manufacturers invented novel and valuable ways to connect medical devices—from smart hospital beds to continuous glucose monitors—the patient benefits were skyrocketing.
At the same time, concerns over the protection of patient data collected by connected devices, and eventually, concerns about intrusions leading to device failure, were also mounting. Indeed, hackers found just such an intrusion point with pacemakers. The manufacturers encrypted communication between the pacemaker and the bedside monitor, but the monitor itself wasn’t secured.
With access to the monitor, these hackers were able to send repeated commands to the pacemaker, depleting its battery life. Even worse, they could instruct the pacemaker to shock the patient. Searching for an answer to protect not only the device but the safety of the patient, many manufacturers turned to digital trust solutions.
5.3: Securing the monitoring systems
Today, thousands of people enjoy peace of mind knowing there’s an effortless, secured monitoring system working to ensure their pacemaker continues to function and alert them of any potential issue. Soon, the capabilities of cardiac technology will grow, offering more patients and their doctors more options for better data and immediate assistance without surgery or hospital visits.
The medical devices will get smaller and smarter, but the security solution that will continue to protect the data — and the life — of the patient will be digital trust. Thousands of hospitals and care centers, and millions of people, across differing compliance and implementation standards, utilize digital trust for use by providers and patients alike.
A security solution that protects the integrity of the device and patient data, and one that’s reliable enough to trust when lives are on the line.
How To Utilize Digital Trust In Building Consumer Confidence
As mentioned, the consumers of the online marketplace are increasingly concerned about digital trust, and many will take their business elsewhere if they don’t receive it. For example, consumers may only buy from companies that have a reputation for protecting their data. In the long run, they may also often consider another brand if a company is unclear about how it will use its data.
Remember, Digital Trust is the expectation by individuals that digital technologies and services – and the organizations providing them – will protect all stakeholders’ interests and uphold societal expectations and values. To innovate in a way that supports individuals’ expectations and values, the digital trust framework may go from conceptual to operational. Where and how do you start?
DigiCert is a great start. It’s a leading provider of digital trust, enabling individuals, businesses, governments, and consortia to engage online with the confidence that their footprint in the digital world is secure. This is the platform for digital trust that provides organizations with centralized visibility and control over a broad range of digital trust needs, including securing websites.
It also offers secure enterprise access and communication, software, identity, content, and devices. It pairs award-winning software with its industry leadership in standards, support, and operations, and is the provider of choice for leading companies around the world who put trust to work.
To build digital trust, organizations should:
- Focus on security, reliability, privacy, and transparency
- Proactively protect against cyber threats
- Set ambitious goals for security and reliability
- Ensure accountability and oversight over their creations
- Promote inclusivity, ethics, and responsibility
It’s worth noting that Earning Digital Trust is not an easy process at all – it’s usually an individual’s expectation that digital technologies and services – and the organizations providing them – will protect all stakeholders’ interests and uphold societal expectations and values. Eventually, Measuring Digital Trust is intended to examine the extent of an organization’s relationship with an actor.
Whether an individual or an organization, the relationship is pretty strong and quite resilient. To help Implement Digital Trust within organizational strategies, operating models, and frontline capabilities, a defined digital trust roadmap is needed. Usually, individual agency by design – is at the core of any strategy seeking to earn trust by developing some human-centered technologies.
In Conclusion;
We tend to think of digital interactions in terms of things we do on a computer or a smartphone, like shopping, email, or applications. But in today’s world, the line between digital and real has become blurred. Connections are everywhere, monitoring and powering vast amounts of data and countless numbers of devices all over the planet.
What’s most important about Digital Trust is often what’s overlooked. Digital doesn’t mean digital anymore. At the heart of digital trust, we find something that’s been the basis of business, agreements, social contracts, and simple human interactions going back millennia. Regardless of the space — physical or virtual — we need to know that our interactions are authentic.
We also need to ensure that our communication is safe and the information we exchange is legitimate and unchanged. Digital Trust is more than a high-minded idea, it’s more than security software. It’s confidence in interactions between anything, or anyone, that connects. In that sense, what’s important about Digital Trust isn’t what it is, but what it does.
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