Trust, regret, forgiveness and comfort for information management in autonomous networked devices.

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This work is situated in the areas of information protection, privacy and computational social norms of trust, regret, forgiveness and comfort. It addresses the problems of inappropriate protection, brittle security models, and contextual security holes in information protection for networked devices such as in the Internet of Things. The world is connected. Devices, many of them in our hands, others in vehicles, buildings, sensors around us and servers globally, continually share, trade, give away, manipulate, rehash, store and redistribute data and information. Much of this information is sensitive – personal, private, identifiable or of some other worth. Many mechanisms exist to help protect this information – traditional security, for instance, seeks to create a system of ‘gatekeepers’ through which we must go in order to access information; Cryptographic solutions seek to make it harder, if not impossible, to see information or data that is not intended for us (but may still be about us); Algorithms exist to best route information based on the security requirements of the information holder. On the other hand, there is a veritable industry in breaking these protections in order have access to this information – both illegitimate and sanctioned, even if the sanctioned is sometimes of questionable legality, as the Snowden revelations have shown. Back doors, phishing, Man in the Middle attacks, cracking passwords and so forth are amongst the many different tools and techniques available to the ‘interested.’ Naturally, security has to fail only once whereas attackers can keep trying. It is in this space that this proposal examines the uses of trust, regret, forgiveness and ‘comfort’ as the means to better evaluate, protect, determine sharing protocols. The goal is not only to create systems that use these social concepts to better manage information.  The specific objectives of this research are to: 1. Examine the role trust plays in information management for networked devices; 2. Refine our existing trust, regret and forgiveness model to a combined model incorporating comfort as a tool for communication and reasoning; 3. Develop appropriate algorithms for the combined model for sharing, protection, filtering, alerting and otherwise managing the information on devices and in networks; 4. Test the algorithms in networked devices, including beacons, mobile personal devices and more powerful computational appliances;  The work has the potential to profoundly impact not only how information is stored, managed and shared, but also the understanding of the people who use it and whom it concerns.