Virtual trust in distributed systems

Abstract

This paper raises two problems of trusted services in distributed organizations. First, on a global scale trust becomes a hard issue to solve for many multinationals since there is no such thing as a global PKI, although many efforts try to overcome this gap. We propose an alternative non- institutionalized trust model to overcome this global trust dilemma. Second, trust prohibits realtime concurrent replication of the trusted service on redundants to increase dependability. We argue why the fuzzy concept trust does not permit replication techniques and propose an indirect approach to trust by indicators. © Springer-Verlag 2004.