Conceptualization of a Trust Dashboard for Distributed Usage Control Systems

Achieving data protection and privacy in modern data processing systems is a prominent topic of academic research today. The goal of retaining comprehensive informational sovereignty requires new and innovative solutions, both technological and methodological in nature. Distributed usage control is a popular technology that can give data providers the ability to actively govern the usage of their personal information even in remote systems. However, the architecture of distributed usage control systems is rather complex and often highly dynamic. This makes the assessment of the system’s soundness and trustworthiness difficult, especially for untrained laypersons. In this work we present the concept of a trust dashboard for distributed usage control systems that are backed by trusted computing technologies. The trust dashboard is intended to give users a visual intuition about the current state of the usage control system and its trustworthiness. We achieve this by using a formal model to describe relevant trust dependencies and the actually conducted remote attestations between usage control components, as well as a-priori trust levels for system operators. Based on this we propose a visualization concept that illustrates the current system state and estimates the overall trustworthiness of the system. Ultimately the trust dashboard aids system operators in the assessment of dynamic and distributed usage control architectures.