Paper 2003/056

Computing of Trust in Distributed Networks

Huafei Zhu, Bao Feng, and Robert H. Deng

Abstract

In distributed networks, a target party $T$ could be a person never meet with a source party $S$, therefore $S$ may not hold any prior evaluation of trustworthiness of $T$. To get permit to access $S$, $T$ should be somewhat trusted by $S$. Consequently, we should study the approach to evaluate trustworthiness of $T$. To attack the problem, we view individual participant in distributed networks as a node of a delegation graph $G$ and map a delegation path from target party $T$ to source party $S$ in networks into an edge in the correspondent transitive closure of graph $G$. Based on the transitive closure property of the graph $G$, we decompose the problem to three related questions below: -how to evaluate trustworthiness of participants in an edge? -how to compute trustworthiness of participants in a path? -how to evaluate the trustworthiness of a target participant in a transitive closure graph? We attack the above three questions by first computing trustworthiness of participants in distributed and authenticated channel. Then we present a practical approach to evaluate trustworthiness by removing the assumption of the authenticated channel in distributed networks.