Trust negotiation (TN) is an automated technique for the establishment of trust and the enforcement of need-to-know between entities in distributed computing systems in which resources are shared across organizational boundaries.
Examples of such systems include the World Wide Web, grid computing systems, and distributed intelligent systems, and ad-hoc networks used by joint military task forces.
At a high level, TN involves the bilateral and iterative exchange of attribute-based access control policies and certified attribute information between parties. Before TN can be used as an effective means of access control for large-scale open systems, it must be demonstrated not only to be sufficient to meet the needs of these systems, but also practical to deploy.
The objective of our ongoing research in this area is to build upon the theoretical successes of earlier research initiatives and to develop secure, robust, and scalable technologies and systems for TN and to explore the policies needed for its successful deployment.
