The ability for countries to interact to enable the secure and trustworthy exchange of modern services, products and data requires a practical security framework with mechanisms, policies, laws and regulations based on mutual recognition. Such frameworks exist at the national and regional level, but there are international differences.  

It is vital that the UK plays a proactive role in the area of international digital trust, especially in the light of post-Brexit trade deals with Japan and the USA. The project aims to create an ontology-based interoperability solution amongst UK, US and Japan for mutual recognition of trust, capturing private sector (supply chains) and public sector (law enforcement) trust requirements at different assurance levels. The overall driving interest encompasses the Data Free Flow with Trust (DFFT) vision advocated by the World Economic Forum.  

Themes:

• International digital trust frameworks and interoperability  
• Mutual recognition of trust services  
• User acceptance  

• Konstantinos Mersinas (ISG) 
• Niki Panteli (Digital Innovation, School of Management) 
• Marc Sel (ISG PhD alumnus) 

An international interdisciplinary team led by Royal Holloway, University of London won a funding award from the International Cyber Security Center of Excellence (INCS-CoE) Digital Trust Sandpit Challenge.  

Dr Konstantinos Mersinas (Primary Investigator, Information Security Group), Prof Niki Panteli (Digital Innovation Management) and Dr Marc Sel (independent consultant; RHUL PhD alumnus) from RHUL teamed up with colleagues Dr Naghmeh Karimi and Dr Roberto Yus from University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), and Dr Takao Kondo and Dr Satoshi Kai from Keio University Tokyo, to compete at the Digital Trust Sandpit Challenge hosted by Northeastern University.