DIMACS TR: 96-17
Decentralized Trust Management
Authors: Matt Blaze, Joan Feigenbaum, and Jack Lacy
ABSTRACT
We identify the "trust management problem" as a distinct and
important component of security in network services. Aspects of the
trust management problem include formulating security policies and
security credentials, determining whether particular sets of
credentials satisfy the relevant policies, and deferring trust to
third parties. Existing systems that support security in networked
applications, including X.509 and PGP, address only narrow subsets of
the overall trust management problem and often do so in a manner that
is appropriate to only one application. We present a comprehensive
approach to trust management, based on a simple language for
specifying trusted actions and trust relationships. We also describe
a prototype implementation of a "trust management system," called
PolicyMaker, that can facilitate the development of security features
in a wide range of network services.
This paper was presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and
Privacy, Oakland CA, May 1996.
Paper Available at:
ftp://dimacs.rutgers.edu/pub/dimacs/TechnicalReports/TechReports/1996/96-17.ps.gz
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