A distributed service, adaptive to trust assessment, based on peer-to-peer e-records replication and storage

The increasing pervasiveness of the Internet is changing the way enterprises are doing businesses. More and more B2B transactions and business interactions are happening on-line by exchanging digital information. Enterprises will continue to be accountable for their actions. Today paper-based evidence is retained for a long time and used to support claims. In the future digital documents will be used for this purpose. We believe there will be a proliferation of trust services to underpin e-businesses and specifically to address the management of long-term digital documents. These services are trusted, distributed, survivable and self-healing. We focus on the problem of long-term storage, integrity and survivability of digital documents (e-records) within an enterprise. We describe a service based on a distributed peer-to-peer architecture that uses cheap and abundant enterprise resources. We stress on the importance of the adaptiveness of this service to the trustworthiness of the distributed components.