HiTrust: A Hybrid Tree Based Trust Negotiation Service

Various promising distributing computing paradigms such as Grids, P2P and Clouds have emerged over Internet. How to build the trust relationship among principals in such an open computing environment has become an important issue. Automated trust negotiation (ATN) approach aims to gradually build trust relationship between strangers through the interactively disclosing of credentials and security policies. In this paper, we propose a hybrid tree model which can embed both policies and credential sets in the tree nodes, and is able to describe fine-grained security policy with attributes or negotiation context information. Based on the hybrid tree model, we design a negotiation tree building algorithm. We have designed a HiTrust System and experimental results demonstrate that the HiTrust service has a good scalability.