Evolving and managing trust in grid computing systems

A grid computing system is a geographically distributed environment with autonomous domains that share resources amongst themselves. One primary goal of such a grid environment is to encourage domain-to-domain interactions and increase the confidence of domains to use or share resources: (a) without losing control over their own resources; and (b) ensuring confidentiality for others. To achieve this, the "trust" notion needs to be addressed so that trustworthiness makes such geographically distributed systems become more attractive and reliable for day-to-day use. In this paper we view trust in two steps: (a) verifying the identity of an entity and what that identity is authorized to do; and (b) monitoring and managing the behavior of the entity and building a trust level based on that behavior The identity trust has been the focus of many researchers, but unfortunately the behavior trust has not attracted much attention. We present a formal definition of behavior trust and reputation and discuss a behavior trust management architecture that models the process of evolving and managing of behavior trust in grid computing systems.