Transitive trust is a relatively easy concept to understand. Transitive trust is the implicit trust of another by an individual. I will use my Mother and Father as the example. My Father wants to keep me the asset safe but the one person he trusts more than anything is my Mother. He trusts my Mother so much that if she trusts or believes in someone else for my safety say my Aunt, my Father will then also trust her as well. This can be a destructive path in the long run from what I see. If my Mother has the transitive trust in my Aunt, she could then trust my Aunt’s neighbor Bill who my Aunt trusts with anything. My Mother would then trust Bill because my Aunt does which in turn would cause my Father to trust Bill as well. Bill though could be a Trojan looking to cause trouble and then would gain access to me by knowing the right person. This would then cause havoc in everything that my Father wanted to keep safe. In terms of a computer you would just have to change my Father to the computer’s owner, my Mother would be a file of a trusted friend that was created on my Fathers computer and My Aunt would be a torrent site that my Father’s friend likes to frequent that had malicious malware. The malicious malware would alter the file that is trusted by the computer’s owner because he did not know where the file was from or altered by. (Smith, 2013, p.165)
Smith, Richard E. (2013) Elementary Information Security. Burlington: Jones and