Trusted third party

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Trusted third party" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (January 2008) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

In cryptography, a trusted third party (TTP) is an entity which facilitates interactions between two parties who both trust the third party; the third party reviews all critical transaction communications between the parties, based on the ease of creating fraudulent digital content. In TTP models, the relying parties use this trust to secure their own interactions. TTPs are common in any number of commercial transactions and in cryptographic digital transactions as well as cryptographic protocols, for example, a certificate authority (CA) would issue a digital certificate to one of the two parties in the next example. The CA then becomes the TTP to that certificate's issuance. Likewise transactions that need a third party recordation would also need a third-party repository service of some kind.

'Trusted' means that a system needs to be trusted to act in your interests, but it has the option (either at will or involuntarily) to act against your interests. 'Trusted' also means that there is no way to verify if that system is operating in your interests, hence the need to trust it. Corollary: if a system can be verified to operate in your interests, it would not need your trust. And if it can be shown to operate against your interests one would not use it.