Trust Management and User’s Trust Perception in e-Business

Trust is essential in the e-business world: to allow the cooperation needed in this setting, independent service providers have to trust each other and, also, end-users have to trust service providers. Trust Management, i.e. the process of establishing trust amongst the parties involved in a transaction, can be carried out using different approaches, methods and technologies. The end-user is an important party involved in this process. Trust Perception models attempt to understand the end-user’s point of view and the pattern he adopts to trust a service over the Internet. In this chapter the authors provide a state of the art for Trust Management in e-business. They review the most important Trust Management technologies and concepts including credentials and PKI, reputation, authorization and access control, trust policies, and trust languages. A conceptual map is presented clarifying the meaning and the links between different elements of a Trust Management system. Moreover, the authors discuss the end-user’s Trust Perception. The chapter presents a literature study on Trust Perception models and introduces the new model, able to list the trust signals the end-user considers to make trust decision. Examples of such signals can be the reputation of a website, the use of security protocols, the privacy policies adopted, and the look and feel of its user interface. Finally, the directions of future work are presented, and conclusions are drawn.