PDTM: A policy-driven trust management framework in distributed systems

Abstract

This paper presents a policy-driven trust management framework (PDTM) which is composed of five interfaces to feature the fully decentralized and policy-driven framework. The transmission interface allows trust instances to be exchanged between principals. The trust induction interface encapsulates the evaluation of policies and answers queries made against these policies. The trust management interface allows the trust instances including collection, storage and retrieval to be downloaded from small mobile devices, where resources are limited. The policy inquiry interface is designed to facilitate communication between strangers, so that unknown policies can be discovered through a query-based process. The trust agent interface, on the other hand, is designed to automate communication between strangers. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.