A formal approach towards measuring trust in distributed systems

  • Authors:
  • Guido Schryen;Melanie Volkamer;Sebastian Ries;Sheikh Mahbub Habib

  • Affiliations:
  • RWTH Aachen, Aachen;CASED/TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt;CASED/TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt;CASED/TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2011 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Emerging digital environments and infrastructures, such as distributed security services and distributed computing services, have generated new options of communication, information sharing, and resource utilization in past years. However, when distributed services are used, the question arises of to what extent we can trust service providers to not violate security requirements, whether in isolation or jointly. Answering this question is crucial for designing trustworthy distributed systems and selecting trustworthy service providers. This paper presents a novel trust measurement method for distributed systems, and makes use of propositional logic and probability theory. The results of the qualitative part include the specification of a formal trust language and the representation of its terms by means of propositional logic formulas. Based on these formulas, the quantitative part returns trust metrics for the determination of trustworthiness with which given distributed systems are assumed to fulfill a particular security requirement.