An Efficient Automated Trust Negotiation Framework Supporting Adaptive Policies

Automated trust negotiation (ATN) is an approach that establishes mutual trust between strangers wishing to share resources or conduct business by gradually requesting and disclosing digitally signed credentials. Previous work on improving negotiation efficiency mainly focuses on using history negotiation information, which may leak much unnecessary information and cannot improve the negotiation efficiency if both negotiators do not have appropriate history information. Thus in this paper, we enhance the negotiation efficiency from a new aspect adaptive policies. An ATN framework is designed to enhance the negotiation efficiency, which can not only simplify the negotiation process and reduce the number of exchanged credentials and credential validations whenever possible, but also avoid to revealing unnecessary information during negotiations. This framework presents a number of innovative features, such as the support for overlapping virtual organizations (VOs for short) to evaluate trustworthiness level, and the use of fine-grained adaptive policies to adjust policies based on the trustworthiness levels.