Trust Negotiation in Dynamic Coalitions

Military and business partners may need to conduct sensitive interactions on line, requiring members in a coalition to share sensitive resources with those outside their local security domain. Automated trust negotiation is an approach that accomplishes this, through the use of access control policies that specify what combinations of digital credentials a stranger must disclose to gain access to a coalition resource. The Trust Negotiation in Dynamic Coalitions project has focused on the theoretical underpinnings of trust negotiation as well as the design and implementation of TrustBuilder, an architecture that incorporates trust negotiation into standard network technologies. This paper summarizes the research contributions of this project to trust negotiation in the areas of sensitive access control policies, strategies, protocols, policy language requirements, and privacy protection. This paper also describes the basic design of TrustBuilder.