Toward Trust Management in Autonomic and Coordination Applications

Abstract

Trust management is an efficient approach to ensure the security and reliability in the autonomic and coordination systems. Various trust management systems are proposed from different viewpoints. However, evaluating different trust management approaches is usually more intuitive than formal. This paper presents a role-based formal framework to specify trust management systems. By quantifying two types of trust commonly occurring in the existing trust management systems, the framework proposes a set of elements to express the assertions and recommendation relationships in trust management. Furthermore, some facilities are provided to specify the semantics of trust engines. The framework makes it more convenient to understand, compare, analyze and design trust management systems.