| title | A Framework for Distributed Trust Management |
| authors | Lalana Kagal, Scott Cost, Timothy Finin, and Yun Peng |
| Second Workshop on Norms and Institutions in MAS, Autonomous Agents, Montreal, Canada, May 29th, 2001. | |
| abstract | In this paper we outline an infrastructure that facilitates trust management in a multi-agent system and then describe an implementation of a system that incorporates it. This model eases the problem of authorization in a network of heterogeneous agents and helps distribute the responsibility. The infrastructure differs from other comparable frameworks in that it allows agents to exchange trust knowledge using a highly descriptive data structure based on Agent Communication Language and includes rule-based reasoning to process authorizations. It decentralizes security decisions, enabling more than one agent to be responsible for the validation of requests or for the delegation of rights. It is very flexible and encourages mobility because requesting services and granting access is divided into two independent steps allowing an agent to disconnect after the first step and reconnect somewhere else to continue the process of securing the service. In the first step the agent requests for permission and receives a ’ticket’. The agent can disconnect after this and can reconnect at any other time, while the ticket is valid, and ask to access the service by providing the ticket. |
| keywords | Authorization, security, distributed trust, agents, X.509 certificates, knowledge representation, role based authorization |
| bibtex |
@inproceedings{kagal-aa-01 , |
| citation | Lalana Kagal, Scott Cost, Timothy Finin, and Yun Peng, A Framework for Distributed Trust Management, Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Norms and Institutions in MAS, Autonomous Agents 2001, Montreal, Canada, May 29, 2001. |
| paper | http://umbc.edu/~finin/papers/nimas01/nimas01.pdf |
| handout | http://umbc.edu/~finin/papers/nimas01/handout.pdf |
| slides |