Google and Indiana University's Net Trust

Post by L. Jean Camp, Associate Professor, Indiana University

Net Trust is a new approach to security being developed at Indiana University's School of Informatics, with funding from Google's Open Source Program Office and released under the Apache license. It is a trust mechanism, not a security mechanism. Net Trust is designed to undermine fraud and credential subversion that use human engineering (also called pretexting) by building interfaces that make use of humans' natural trust behaviors.

The goal is to leverage social trust for online trust, not to use technological mechanisms to create new modes of trust. Net Trust provides social and human solutions to their respective elements of masquerade attacks and human engineering.

Net Trust is in early development at Google Code and is available in demo mode. It can be downloaded and used, including warning boxes and the interaction experience, though the backend is not yet constructed. Please feel free to play with it and contribute!