Collaborative automated trust negotiation.

Abstract

Automated trust negotiation is a new approach to access control and authentication for the open systems such as the Internet, where sensitive interactions sometimes occur among entities with no prior knowledge of each other. Trust negotiation enables open computing by assigning an access control policy to each resource that is to be made accessible to “strangers”; an attempt to access the resource triggers a trust negotiation, consisting of the iterative, bilateral disclosure of digital credentials and related policies. In this thesis, we present Collaborative Automated Trust Negotiation, an extension of existing automated trust negotiation approaches by exploiting collaborative behaviors among negotiating parties. Collaborative trust negotiation is an efficient way of building trust in a group of parties, because it can promote successful trust negotiations and speed up the trust building process. We use visualization to understand and analysis the behaviors of negotiators that conduct trust negotiations collaboratively. We also investigate security issues involved in collaborative trust negotiation. We developed a visualization framework to statically and dynamically analyze collaborative trust negotiation activities. We also design and develop a fast algorithm to identify core-periphery structures in the communication network that formed by negotiation parties and their negotiation activities. The core-periphery structure is exploited to facilitate proactive trust negotiations and thus allow more successful trust negotiations. The visualization framework can be used to analyze other types of communication networks such as email communications, wireless and sensor networks; it can also be used to study the fields where network patterns are available, for example, document relevance networks on the web.