Trust management in global distributed systems

David Jelenc (2009) Trust management in global distributed systems. EngD thesis.

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Abstract

This work tackles the barriers of managing trust in globally distributed systems. In the beginning we define terms of trust and reputation, the difference between them, and describe how they relate to security. Later on we present the definitions that are needed for trust and reputation management, analyse the basic architectural approaches for constructing trust managing systems, and give an overview of quantitative and qualitative trust models. We continue with analysing client-server and peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures, stating their advantages and weak points and describing web services in brief. The core of this work is an analysis of the problem, which is the best approach to integrate globally distributed trust management systems. We construct a centralised system, that derivates from client-server model, and a P2P system, which originates in P2P model. For each of them, we provide their strong points and weaknesses, and recommend the type of environment they should be used in. Caching, as means of improving performance, is also discussed, alongside selecting the appropriate entity identification, which should be unique even in integrated systems. At the end, we present two distinct strategies of exchanging assessments between systems.

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