A Privacy Preserving Enhanced Trust Building Mechanism for Web Services

With the development of web services, more effective trust building mechanisms are needed to deploy diverse trust models in a web services environment. The lack of mechanisms that can dynamically build trust relationships while preserving privacy impedes progress. Current web service technologies encourage a client to reveal all its private attributes in a pre-packaged digital credential to the service provider as a requirement for verification. This leads to privacy leakage. We propose a mechanism that discloses only the attributes required to negotiate a trust relationship, thereby preserving the client’s privacy. After the trust negotiation is successful and trust has been established, we use dynamic validation to monitor and maintain the trust relationship.