A Distributed Context-Aware Trust Management Architecture1

The realization of a pervasive context-aware service platform imposes new challenges for the security and privacy aspects of the system in relation to traditional service platforms. One important aspect is related with the management of trust relationships, which is especially hard in a pervasive environment because users are supposed to interact with entities unknown before hand in an ad-hoc and dynamic manner. Current trust management solutions do not adapt nor scale well in this dynamic service provisioning scenario because they require previously defined trust relationships in order to operate. The objective of this thesis is to design, prototype and validate a context-aware distributed trust management architecture in order to address: (a) the lack of integration between available trust solutions and security and privacy management languages, and (b) the dynamic characteristics of a context-aware service platform.