Trust in Distributed Information Systems

Trust management is an important issue in the analysis and design of secure information systems. This is especially the case where centrally managed security is not possible. Trust issues arise not only in business functions, but also in technologies used to support these functions. There are a vast number of services and applications that must accommodate appropriate notions of trust. Trust and trust management have become a hot research area. The motivation of this dissertation is to build up a comprehensive trust management approach that covers the analysis/modelling of trust relationships and the development of trust management systems in a consistent manner. A formal model of trust relationship is proposed with a strict mathematical structure that can not only reflect many of the commonly used notions of trust, but also provide a solid basis for a unified taxonomy framework of trust where a range of useful properties of trust relationships can be expressed and compared. A classification of trust relationships is presented. A set of definitions, propositions, and operations are proposed for the properties about scope and diversity of trust relationships, direction and symmetry of trust relationships, and relations of trust relationships. A general methodology for analysis and modelling of trust relationships in