Towards a generic trust management model

Trust is one of the fundamental security concepts since it provides network collaborating entities with a mean to counter their uncertainty. Trust is generally integrated into existent security frameworks in order to add a security level to entities collaborations through the use of trust relations. Besides, benefiting from trust relations implies establishing them, updating them when needed and revoking them if necessary. Unfortunately, using trust can be a hard task since it has to cope with subjectivity and may change according to the involved entities. A formal model can be used to alleviate this problem. One way to formalize trust concept is the use of trust management. This latter allows unifying and standardizing trust as well as all its inherent concepts. It provides needful basis for trust establishment, update and revocation. Different dedicated trust management models were proposed corresponding to existing specific needs. Our main contribution in this paper is then, the proposition of a generic trust management model suitable to the most communication domains and needs. This model is based on the main trust concepts such as recommendations and reputations as well as the main properties such as permanence, transitivity and asymmetry.