Bridging Trust Relationships with Web Service Enhancements

With the development of Web technology and distributed systems, online collaborations are becoming more common and more demanding. Web services now provide standard mechanisms to enable online interactions. Yet security, privacy and trust-related protection mechanisms for Web services need additional development. In an interconnected network environment, physical connections with proper security protections are required for bridging two autonomous networks. Likewise, collaborating organizations need mechanisms for bridging extant relationships among cooperating parties that provide proper protection for privacy and trust. A trust establishment mechanism for Web services must therefore ensure privacy and owner control at all times due to the subjectivity of trust relationships. This paper describes an indirect trust establishment mechanism to bridge and build new trust relationships from extant trust relationships providing privacy protection and owner control simultaneously