End to End Trust: Seeing the End from the Beginning

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 06:08:42 Z

A year ago last April, Scott Charney penned a new whitepaper around the vision of End to End Trust. He concluded with the following question: As we become increasingly dependent on the Internet for all our daily activities, can we maintain a globally connected, anonymous, untraceable Internet and be dependent on devices that run arbitrary code of unknown provenance? With growing concerns around the threat of cyber security in headlines, and online safety a major topic of focus at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, it is clear the general public is becoming more acutely aware of these types of questions and how their lives are impacted, and how web security is evolving.

Such awareness is ultimately a good thing because out of this increased discussion and debate, we can begin to align the technology with the social, political and economic forces necessary to bring a greater level of trust to our online experiences, and that is the vision behind End to End Trust.

This forum was developed as an opportunity to ask all who care about online safety to join in a robust and meaningful discussion about building a more trusted Internet. The goal of End to End Trust is to further users’ control of their computing environments, increasing security and privacy, and preserving other values that we cherish such as anonymity and freedom of speech. In order to make that a reality, we must align social, economic and political requirements with IT capabilities.

As we look to address these challenges collectively as an industry, three questions have been top of mind at Microsoft and in the industry:

1) What are the appropriate ways to engage all of these disparate interests (social, economic, political and technological)?

2) How do we clearly identify and prioritize which problems need to be solved and in what spheres?

3) How can we catalyze the right actions (what) by the right parties (who) at the right times (when)?