A flexible architecture for privacy-aware trust management

In service-oriented systems a constellation of services cooperate, sharing potentially sensitive information and responsibilities. Cooperation is only possible if the different participants trust each other. As trust may depend on many different factors, in a flexible framework for Trust Management (TM) trust must be computed by combining different types of information. In this paper we describe the TAS3 TM framework which integrates independent TM systems into a single trust decision point. The TM framework supports intricate combinations whilst still remaining easily extensible. It also provides a unified trust evaluation interface to the (authorization framework of the) services. We demonstrate the flexibility of the approach by integrating three distinct TM paradigms: reputation-based TM, credential-based TM, and Key Performance Indicator TM. Finally, we discuss privacy concerns in TM systems and the directions to be taken for the definition of a privacy-friendly TM architecture.\u

Flow-based reputation: more than just ranking

The last years have seen a growing interest in collaborative systems like electronic marketplaces and P2P file sharing systems where people are intended to interact with other people. Those systems, however, are subject to security and operational risks because of their open and distributed nature. Reputation systems provide a mechanism to reduce such risks by building trust relationships among entities and identifying malicious entities. A popular reputation model is the so called flow-based model. Most existing reputation systems based on such a model provide only a ranking, without absolute reputation values; this makes it difficult to determine whether entities are actually trustworthy or untrustworthy. In addition, those systems ignore a significant part of the available information; as a consequence, reputation values may not be accurate. In this paper, we present a flow-based reputation metric that gives absolute values instead of merely a ranking. Our metric makes use of all the available information. We study, both analytically and numerically, the properties of the proposed metric and the effect of attacks on reputation values

Reputation-based ontology alignment for autonomy and interoperability in distributed access control

Vocabulary alignment is a main challenge in distributedaccess control as peers should understand each other’spolicies unambiguously. Ontologies enable mutual understanding among peers by providing a precise semantics to concepts and relationships in a domain. However, due to the distributed nature of ontology development, ontology alignment is required to allow peers to make informed access control decisions. The alignment should be flexible and accurate to not undermine the autonomy and reliability of peers. This paper addresses the problem of ontology alignment in distributed access control by combining ontology-based trust management with a reputation system