Automated trust negotiation

Abstract
Distributed software subjects face the problem of determining one another''s trustworthiness. The problem considered is managing the exchange of sensitive credentials between strangers for the purpose of property-based authentication and authorization. An architecture for trust negotiation between client and server is presented. The notion of a trust negotiation strategy is introduced and examined with respect to an abstract model of trust negotiation. Two strategies with very different properties are defined and rigorously analyzed. A language of credential expressions is presented, with two example negotiations illustrating the two negotiation strategies. Ongoing work on policies governing credential disclosure and trust negotiation is summarized. A prototype trust negotiation system has been constructed and is discussed.

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