Towards Automated Trust Negotiation for Grids

Trust is an important aspect of decision making for grid applications. It has been a fundamental but challenging problem to gain assurance of the trustworthiness of service providers or requesters. This paper proposes a novel trust negotiation framework, ENVOY, to establish trust relationship between service providers and requesters in grids. ENVOY supports various kinds of delegation by leveraging attribute-based credentials and defines delegation range expediently by using attribute constraint, and we develop a negotiation strategy based on protection tree to support ENVOY, which provides the support for protection of sensitive information of the two negotiation parties. Moreover, ENVOY employs multithreaded technology and trust ticket to speed up negotiation. This paper describes the implementation of ENVOY and designs experiments to evaluate its performance, and the experimental results show that it is applicable.