Utility Sampling for Trust Metrics in PKI

Dakshi Agrawal; Charanjit Jutla

Paper 2007/178

Utility Sampling for Trust Metrics in PKI

Dakshi Agrawal

Charanjit Jutla

Abstract

We propose a new trust metric for a network of public key certificates, e.g. as in PKI, which allows a user to buy insurance at a fair price on the possibility of failure of the certifications provided while transacting with an arbitrary party in the network. Our metric builds on a metric and model of insurance provided by Reiter and Stubblebine~\cite{RS}, while addressing various limitations and drawbacks of the latter. It conserves all the beneficial properties of the latter over other schemes, including protecting the user from unintentional or malicious dependencies in the network of certifications. Our metric is built on top of a simple and intuitive model of trust and risk based on ``utility sampling'', which maybe of interest for non-monetary applications as well.

Note: Added a pdf version of the paper version from 2008.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Publication info: Preprint.
Keywords: Public Keys PKI Certificates Trust Insurance
Contact author(s): agrawal @ us ibm com
csjutla @ us ibm com
History: 2024-11-05: revised; 2007-05-20: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2007/178
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2007/178,
      author = {Dakshi Agrawal and Charanjit Jutla},
      title = {Utility Sampling for Trust Metrics in {PKI}},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2007/178},
      year = {2007},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2007/178}
}