Valuation of Trust in Open Networks

Authentication in open networks usually requires participation of trusted entities. Many protocols allow trust to be obtained by recommendation of other entities whose recommendations are known to be reliable. To consider an entity as being trustworthy, especially if there have been several mediators or contradicting recommendations, it is necessary to have a means of estimating its trustworthiness. In this paper we present a method for the valuation of trustworthiness which can be used to accept or reject an entity as being suitable for sensitive tasks. It constitutes an extension of the work of Yahalom, Klein and Beth ((YKB93]).