Agent-based automated trust negotiation for pervasive computing

For pervasive computing systems, how to trust the mobile clients such as devices, users and applications is a great challenge. This paper provides an answer to this question by introducing an agent-based automated trust negotiation framework. In this trust negotiation framework, the client tries to establish the trust relationship with the system through an active trust negotiation scheme. The first stage in this active trust negotiation scheme is to download the trust negotiation strategy from the host system. In the second stage, the client and the host system use the same trust negotiation strategy to establish trust relationship between them so that the client can be granted to access the requested resources. By using the mobile agents, security capsules, to encode the definition and interpretation of trust negotiation strategies, trust negotiation strategies can be distributed and loaded dynamically and transparently. The mobility, transparency and configurability brought by the security capsules make this framework flexible, adaptive and dynamic for automated trust negotiation between different clients and systems.