An EMAIL Based Automated Trust Negotiation Model

Automated trust negotiation (ATN) is an important means to establish trust between strangers through the exchange of digital credentials and mobile access control policies specifying what combinations of credentials a stranger must submit. While ATN provides a good mechanism to share resources in the open and distributed environments, there still exist some pitfalls. A notable problem is that the negotiation process is easy to be interrupted, which leads the negotiation to failure. Thereto, current protection techniques are somehow complex and heavyweight, which greatly limits ATN´s applications. To solve these problems, an Email Based ATN Model (EBAM) is proposed. A credential template and an access control policy template are specified to carry information. All the transmitted messages are encrypted by private keys. The data exchange is realized through the negotiators´ emails. A use case is given to show how it works, which proves the model sound and reasonable.