Intelligent Agents as Trust Negotiators for Federated Security

Competitive pressures on organizations force a need to rapidly build relationships with newer businesses. As desperate organizations begin to share business processes and solve each others problems, there is a need to share sensitive information. Though standards like WS- * attempt to offer security standards, they do not offer a mechanism to automatically negotiate trust levels in a federation of systems. This inability adversely affects the time to market. Automatic trust negotiation is a process oriented approach to classify information, assign trust levels to cooperating businesses, upgrading or downgrading trust levels based on the qualities of the relationship. This paper details a case study delivered to a large airline business. This case study demonstrates a service oriented competitive decision making system which uses intelligent agents not only to negotiate based on business strategies but also the appropriate trust levels.