External Object Trust Zone Mapping for Information Clustering

In a loosely-coupled system various objects may be imported from different sources and the integrity levels of these objects can vary widely. Like downloaded information from the World Wide Web, these imported objects should be carefully organized and disseminated to different trust zones, which meet the security requirements of different groups of internal applications. Assigning an object to a trust zone is called trust zone mapping, which is essentially a form of information clustering and is designed to guide internal applications when they are using objects from different zones. We developed methods to perform trust zone mapping based on objects’ trust attribute values. The defined threshold selection operators allow internal applications to best express their major security concerns while tolerating unimportant issues to certain degrees. As two major trust attributes, the primary and secondary trust values are explained and we illustrate how to calculate each of them.