Autonomic trust management in a component based software system

Abstract

Trust plays an important role in a software system, especially when, the system is component based and varied due to component joining and leaving. How to manage trust in such a system is crucial for embedded devices, such as mobile phones. This paper presents a trust management solution that can manage trust adaptively in a component based software (CBS) system. We develop a formal trust model to specify, evaluate and set up trust relationships that exist among system entities. We further present an autonomic trust management architecture that adopts a number of algorithms for trust assessment and maintenance during component execution. These algorithms use recent advances in Subjective Logic to ensure the management of trust within the CBS system. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.