Trust and trustworthiness apply to a wide range of applications in automation and human interactions. Their definitions and characteristics vary depending on the context and the situation. Nevertheless, they are significant because of risk, vulnerability, uncertainty, and confidence. In this paper we review past work to converge our understanding of Trust (human centric and subjective) and trustworthiness (hardware/software centric and objective) across fields including literature from psychological, sociological, economic, automation, and cyberspace perspectives of trust. We expect to create a more rigorous definition of trust and trustworthiness that leads to finding the appropriate metrics to measure trust and trustworthiness dynamically.

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Trust and trustworthiness are significant measurements of a distributed sensing system or a heterogeneous network comprised of sources of information, knowledge, hardware and software. In an effort to design a unified trust model that can be made adaptable to changing application environments, we present fundamental features and rules extracted from literature pertaining to wireless sensor networks, social networks, e-commerce, mobile ad-hoc, peer-to-peer, and distributed network services. The design constraints are: it must (a) support a heterogeneous network, (b) obtain and evaluate multiple trustworthiness measures, (c) be carried out with computational ease without extensive computational power from the sensor network, and (d) be conceptually simple but have a firm basis in theory.