Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2003/056

Computing of Trust in Distributed Networks

Huafei Zhu and 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.

Category / Keywords: applications /

Publication Info: new report

Date: received 30 Mar 2003

Contact author: huafei at i2r a-star edu sg

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Version: 20030331:065619 (All versions of this report)

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