An Architecture to Facilitate Membership and Service Management in Trusted Communities

Abstract

Ubiquitous connectivity today allows many users to remain connected regardless of location with various kinds of communities. This paper studies challenges in building trusted communities that encompass both new users as well as users already possessing credentials from other well known connectivity providers, federations, content providers and social networks. We postulate that trusted communities are initially created as a means to access some services, but become enriched with user created services. We present an architecture aimed at managing the complexity of service composition, access as well as guarantees of authenticity. Since users possess multiple credentials from various identity providers, we address this in our architecture from the service access perspective. In addition, our model explicitly takes into account cases where users may temporarily be granted access to a community’s services based on recommendations from existing members.