What Does Trust Really Mean in Cybersecurity?
Organizations talk about building trust with their customers. Security teams talk about protecting it.
Yet unlike other assets in an organization, trust remains frustratingly abstract. Ask five different teams what it means, and you’ll get five different answers. So what are we actually talking about when we say "trust"?
The Trust Problem
Trust is often treated as a virtue, not an operational asset you can invest in or measure. It shows up in phrases like:
“We want to be a trusted brand.”
“Customers trust us with their data.”
“We need to earn the trust of our users.”
But without a shared definition, security teams are left chasing fog. You can't protect what you haven't clearly defined.
I once worked at an organization where I was asked to build a Trust Dashboard—a way to show leadership how we were “building and maintaining trust.” It failed. Not because we didn’t try, but because we skipped two essential questions:
What does trust mean to our organization?
Who are we trying to prove this to—users? partners? internal stakeholders?
The answer varies. A customer will interpret trust differently than a corporate partner. Our service delivery team may define it one way, our board of directors another.
We turned to dictionary definitions—like "assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.” That sounds nice, but how do you actually protect that? Measure it? Indicate progress?
A Practical Definition for Trust
Trust is the ability to predict how an entity will behave.
A colleague, Josh Schwartz, shared this definition with me and I keep coming back to it because it does what most definitions don’t… it turns trust into something observable and operational.
Why this works:
It’s measurable. If behavior is consistent and expected, trust increases.
It’s scalable. It applies to people, teams, systems, vendors—even code.
It’s actionable. If we want to build trust, we need to reduce uncertainty.
It’s human.
Trust is how we navigate uncertainty in relationships. As sociologist Diego Gambetta writes in Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, trust is:
“A particular level of the subjective probability with which an agent assesses that another agent or group of agents will perform a particular action.”
In plain terms, trust is a mental bet: how likely is this person (or system) to behave as expected?
Think of your coworkers. You trust them to show up to work each day. If they suddenly stopped for no reason, you’d question their reliability and the trust you had would suffer.
Going back to my failed Trust dashboard project: Had we defined trust as "uninterrupted access to our content", we might have had a shot. If users expect our platform to be available and accessible, then we can measure our trustworthiness with metrics like login success rates, availability, or time to recovery.
When you use predictability of behavior as your definition, it brings clarity:
Trust becomes a function of whether expectations are consistently met. As consistency decreases, uncertainty grows—and trust dissolves.
Why This Matters to Security
Security is, at its core, the business of reducing uncertainty (or at least managing it). We are constantly evaluating systems for deviations from expected behavior.
Security isn't just about protecting data.
It's about making behavior more predictable and verifiable.
We can build trust internally by being a team that behaves consistently:
Communicating early and often.
Following through on commitments (SLAs, risk assessments, reviews).
Supporting the business in achieving its goals (baseline configurations, timely decisions, fraud reduction).
The more consistent we are, the more people know what to expect. That predictability is trust.
Questions to Ask Internally
Do stakeholders know how our team will behave during a security incident?
Do vendors respond consistently when things go wrong?
Are our policies clear enough to guide consistent decision-making?
If the answer is “no,” we don’t have a trust problem. We have a predictability problem.
My former boss, Bob Lord, used to say:
“Trust is earned in drops, and lost in buckets.”
That’s exactly it. Trust is a long game of consistent behavior, quietly building confidence until one day, the business relies on you without hesitation.
Asifo Says...
Trust isn’t just a desirable outcome. It’s a function. One that security teams are uniquely positioned to help design. But first, we have to define it not as a feeling, but as a pattern of behavior that reduces uncertainty.
Let’s stop treating trust like a buzzword, and start treating it like a design principle:
Predictable behavior, consistently reinforced.