Distributed Trust Through the Lens of Software Architecture

TL;DR

This paper surveys the concept of distributed trust across multiple disciplines, focusing on system and software architecture perspectives to understand trust redistribution, tradeoffs, and implications in various distributed systems.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of distributed trust from a system architecture viewpoint, highlighting tradeoffs and technological implications across different fields.

Findings

Distributed trust is central to blockchain, AI, and cybersecurity.

Trust redistribution involves significant tradeoffs in system design.

Distributed trust technologies enable new system capabilities.

Abstract

Distributed trust is a nebulous concept that has evolved from different perspectives in recent years. While one can attribute its current prominence to blockchain and cryptocurrency, the distributed trust concept has been cultivating progress in federated learning, trustworthy and responsible AI in an ecosystem setting, data sharing, privacy issues across organizational boundaries, and zero trust cybersecurity. This paper will survey the concept of distributed trust in multiple disciplines. It will take a system/software architecture point of view to look at trust redistribution/shift and the associated tradeoffs in systems and applications enabled by distributed trust technologies.