So the topic of “trust” always generates a million emails on various lists.  Rather than rolling-up my own definition, I thought I’d borrow a good definition from the Trusted Computing Group community (courtesy of Graeme Proudler of HP Labs, UK).

It is safe to trust something when:

1. It can be unambiguously identified.
2. It operates unhindered.
3. The user has first hand experience of consistent, good, behavior.

The definition is that of “technical trust”, namely “trust” in the mechanics of some computation (e.g. cryptographic computation, etc). In this case it refers to the TPM hardware. Note that “unhindered operation” is paramount for technical trust.  This is still somewhat of a challenge for software (eg. think multi-tenant clouds and VMs).