A system and method is provided that establishes and maintains conditional trust by stating a signal of distrust from a trustee's computing platform to a trustor's computing platform. The trustor attests a trustee at a given time and also sends trust conditions to the trustee upon which the trustor trusts the trustee for some intended purpose. The trust conditions may include restrictions on hardware or software components and any status changes to the hardware or software components. The trustee then monitors the hardware and software components in relation to the trust conditions and reports distrust signals when the trustee's hardware and software configuration no longer matches the trust conditions.