Using Web Services to Exchange Security Tokens for Federated Trust Management

In federated networks, trust management is critical to information sharing and online collaboration. Security tokens provide a way to convey and exchange trust-related information for security and privacy purposes. Common users encounter difficulties when they have to handle security tokens across heterogeneous domains. Semantic gaps and incompatibilities are major barriers for trust-related information exchange in federated trust management. This paper uses intermediary-based, query-based and hybrid approaches to resolve these issues for different types of information in security tokens, and proposes three exchange models accordingly. This paper also provides a comprehensive framework using Web services to exchange security tokens across security domains with suitable approaches and exchange models.