Enabling trust-awareness in naming services

Abstract

In a distributed system entities perform their respective activities by consuming or providing each other services. For the entities deployed in a global computing scenario it is important to be aware of the trustworthiness of each other. Trust-awareness enables entities to decide either which service provider to refer to or whether to accept a service request from a client; additionally, trust degrees enable entities to negotiate which security measures to employ for interacting with each other. This paper describes TAw, an implementation of the social reputation model described in [11,12]; TAw is a peer-to-peer architecture designed to maintain the notion of reputation in a global computing environment and integrate existing naming technologies. A TAw peer is transparently interposed between a client application and the naming service. TAw peers proactively gossip with each other exchanging trust information; the gossiping technique allows the whole system to scalably and flexibly maintain trust information in a human-like manner. © Springer-Verlag 2004.