Why do we have a trust tag?

Question

The trust tag appears to have been introduced in the past two months and has now been applied to three questions with no common theme that I can discern besides the use of the word ‘trust’:

• Do people sign my subkey?
• Is this pairing scheme for establishing trust between two devices with self-signed TLS certs secure from MITM?
• Should we trust the NIST-recommended ECC parameters?

There is no usage guidance or tag wiki.

Does the trust tag actually serve a useful organizational purpose, or can we remove it?

Answer 1

The word ‘trust’ is too vague and general to serve any purpose in the lexicon of the field. Its useful role is limited, at best, to the pithy substitution ‘be vulnerable to’. There is no meaningful common theme to the three questions and the tag serves no useful organizational purpose.

Remove the trust tag.

Answer 2

trust is a concept in security, but it's rather vague. I think it's warranted on Security, which habitually deals with such higher-level concepts, but on Cryptography, we need more precise tags. As I write, there are 7 questions with this tag, and I can't see a unifying theme:

• Anonymous trust/reputation system — trust as in reputation, within a closed group and for a specific purpose.
• Should we trust the NIST-recommended ECC parameters? — this question is not about trust, here trust is used as a “meta tag”.
• Establish Trust By Signing Random Seed — that's trust only in the very restricted sense of authentication.
• What does trust mean in cryptography? — the only question where I think trust as a tag would be warranted, if the tag was warranted at all. But the question is itself problematic since “trust” doesn't have a single meaning.
• Using nested signatures to trust public key of inner signatures — that's “trust” in the sense of trusting third-party identity claims, i.e. pki.
• Do people sign my subkey? — again pki.
• Is this pairing scheme for establishing trust between two devices with self-signed TLS certs secure from MITM? — again authentication.

Conclusion: we should manually get rid of the tag, in some cases by replacing it with a more appropriate tag.