Distributed Trust Through the Lens of Software Architecture
It provides a foundational overview for researchers and practitioners in fields like blockchain, federated learning, and cybersecurity, but is incremental as a survey.
This paper surveys the concept of distributed trust across multiple disciplines, analyzing trust redistribution and tradeoffs from a software architecture perspective.
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.