PeerTrust: Automated Trust Negotiation for Peers on the Semantic Web

Researchers have recently begun to develop and investigate policy languages to describe trust and security requirements on the Semantic Web [14, 24]. Such policies will be one component of a run-time system that can negotiate to establish trust on the Semantic Web. In this paper, we show how to express different kinds of access control policies and control their use at run time using PeerTrust, a new approach to trust establishment. We show how to use guarded distributed logic programs as the basis for PeerTrust’s simple yet expressive policy and trust negotiation language, built upon the rule layer of the Semantic Web layer cake. We describe the syntax and semantics of GDLPs, and compare PeerTrust’s language to other approaches to implementing policies and trust negotiation. Through examples, we show how PeerTrust can be used to support delegation, policy protection and negotiation strategies. Finally, we discuss the PeerTrust automated trust negotiation engine prototype implemented in Prolog, and identify areas for further research.