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A Formal Definition for Trust in Distributed Systems

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Information Security (ISC 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 3650))

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Abstract

Trust is an important concept in distributed computing environments and plays a critical role in ensuring and enhancing system security. Although various trust models have been proposed for distributed or pervasive computing systems, little research has been conducted to describe trust in precise and formal way. In this paper, we present a formal definition to express the meaning of trust in distributed computing systems. With this definition, we rigorously analyze the important properties of trust relation, such as reflexivity and conditional transitivity, and describe the trust relations in Role-Based Access Control. Our definition is comprehensive in that the semantic meaning of the trust definition is feasible to describe trust relations in both traditional distributed systems and dynamic pervasive computing environments. This research provides a solid base for formal trust reasoning and effective trust management implementation in distributed systems and pervasive computing environments.

This research is supported by the NSF Grant 0406325.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Software and Information Systems, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, 28223, USA

    Daoxi Xiu & Zhaoyu Liu

Authors
  1. Daoxi Xiu
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  2. Zhaoyu Liu
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Cryptography and Security Department Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore

    Jianying Zhou

  2. Department of Information and Communication Technologies, University of A Coruña, Spain

    Javier Lopez

  3. School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University, Singapore

    Robert H. Deng

  4. Institute for Infocomm Research, 119613, Singapore

    Feng Bao

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Xiu, D., Liu, Z. (2005). A Formal Definition for Trust in Distributed Systems. In: Zhou, J., Lopez, J., Deng, R.H., Bao, F. (eds) Information Security. ISC 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3650. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11556992_35

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11556992_35

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-29001-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31930-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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