Research on automated trust negotiation

The proliferation of the Internet has given opportunities on different entities to share resources or conduct business transactions. However, how to establish trust among strangers without prior relationship and common security domain poses much difficulty for these activities. To resolve these problems, a promising approach known as Automated Trust Negotiation (ATN), which establishes the trust between strangers with iterative disclosure of credentials and access control policies, is proposed. In this paper, a comprehensive survey of research on ATN is presented, and some basic techniques, e.g. negotiation model and architecture, access control policy specification, credential description and credential chain discovery, are introduced and compared. Then based on the analysis of the shortcomings and problems of the techniques, the trend of research and application is discussed. All these work may contribute to the further work on trust establishment for entities with privacy protection and autonomy in open Internet.