Cyber-Vigilance and Digital Trust

2Trust Management Systems: a Retrospective Study on Digital Trust

2.1. Introduction

The evolution of communication from standalone systems to open and decentralized ones has driven research to think beyond security. Indeed, the astonishing recent advances in computer systems and networks has boosted the use of the Internet, especially via mobile devices. This new pervasive nature of the Internet has enabled billions¹ of people, distributed worldwide, to intensify their usage by creating, sharing and interacting in many different ways among open and decentralized systems. More than any other form of interaction, collaboration relies on resources, information and knowledge sharing, making security a critical issue (Renzl 2008; Casimir et al. 2012).

The concept of trust has been recognized as an interaction enabler in situations of risk and uncertainty (Jøsang et al. 2007; Yaich et al. 2013). Based on this concept, several trust management systems have been proposed in distributed artificial intelligence and in security. Initially, the concept of trust management systems (Blaze et al. 1996, 1999b) was introduced by researchers working in access control regarding mechanisms that make use of credentials and policies to express delegation of rights based on existing ad hoc trust relationships. In this approach, it is the resources’ owners, and not the security administrators, that are responsible for specifying who and when access can be granted. Therefore, the role of a trust management ...