An Infrastructure for Gaining Trust in Context Information

In order to use context information for security decisions it is desired to have confidence that context information really represents the actual context of an entity. Existing context-aware architectures that are able to acquire context information upon request by an application are not capable of gaining this confidence. We propose a new context-aware architecture that embeds a trust evaluation infrastructure to establish a trust relationship to the source of context information and to analyze and assess context information for its plausibility. The trust evaluation infrastructure is generic in the sense that it can be applied to various fields of application since the trust evaluation methods that are tailored to a specific field of application can be added and removed dynamically