FORT: A decentralized automated trust negotiation framework for grids

Trust has been recognized as an important factor for grid security. This paper proposes a decentralized automated trust negotiation framework, FORT, to establish trust relationship between service providers and service requesters in grids. FORT presents many innovative features. First, FORT is decentralized, so it scales well and is well-suited for large-scale grids. Second, FORT refines its policy language with attribute constraint, so it can provide the support for effective protection of sensitive information of the two negotiation parties and flexible limitation of delegation range. Last, we employ multithreaded technology to speed up negotiation. This paper depicts the implementation of FORT and designs experiments to evaluate its performance. Experimental results show that FORT can effectively protect sensitive services at the cost of little performance of systems and is scalable.