A trust model for capability delegation in federated policy systems

Federated policy systems are required to support the complexity and organizational heterogeneity of the modern marketplace. The Community-based Policy Management System (CBPMS) is such a distributed policy management approach. It utilizes a tree-based capability authority model to partition and delegate federated capabilities. However CBPMS delegation chains have limitations such as: performance overheads due to distributed rule evaluation, threats from malformed or malicious federated principals and a lack of flexibility with respect to delegation chain reduction or capability authority re-partitioning. In this paper we introduce a trust management model for CBPMS that addresses all of these issues.. A brief security analysis is presented and a telecommunications service management use case described.