Special Session on Trust Management in Collaborative Global Computing

Workshop Dates: June 9-11 2003
University of Linz, Linz, Austria

Sponsors: IEEE Computer Society, Concurrent Engineering Research Center (CERC) at West Virginia University, USA

WETICE is an annual, international forum for state-of-the-art research in enabling technologies for collaboration.

Scope of the special session on trust management

The development of new computing paradigms such as global computer networks has introduced new problems into the field of computer security. The increase in the scale and the inherent rise in complexity of systems where interactions/collaboration occur between unknown components have led to increased security requirements in environments which lack the benefit of a central control authority. This lack of central control shifts responsibility for security decisions to the participating entities themselves, which require the ability for autonomous operation and automatic reconfiguration to adapt to unforeseen changes in their environment. The inflexible nature of traditional hard-coded security mechanisms has led to new research, which highlights management of trust relationships as a possible avenue for the resolution of these issues. While the idea of trust is common in computing, the current static nature of trust relationships predefined by an administrator is insufficient for the promotion of ad-hoc relationships between new entities. The concept of a computational notion of trust will enable entities to reason about and evaluate relevant evidence before making security decisions.

Recent years have seen the emergence of a new security paradigm, the concept of trust management.Trust management can be used as a means to reason about and accept risk in situations where only partial information is available about entities seeking collaboration. Accepting risk via this mechanism allows entities to interact on the basis of available knowledge, assigning privileges or tasks to others accordingly. The complex range of characteristics of trust identified by humans however, makes it very difficult to form an exact definition of trust for use in a flexible security model.

The aim of the session is to establish a trust research community to further investigation into trust and to promote the adoption of trust-based security mechanisms in global computing. Moreover, the session will bring together leading figures from academia and industry to assess the state-of-the-art in the area.

In this workshop we focus on the core areas of trust management for collaborative global computing, in light of the fundamental demands of this domain. We seek to compliment the discussion and presentations at WETICE 2003, by providing a forum focused on the specific problems of trust management in large scale, real world, global computing. Moreover, we seek to develop a community of researchers who will specifically target the development of practical and sustainable global computing and provide the key elements needed for secure collaboration in diverse application domains.

Topics of Interest

Papers are solicited on, but not limited to, these topics:

• Relationship Between Trust and Risk
• Evaluating and Monitoring Trust
• Trust life-cycle
• Formal Models for Trust Relationships
• Trust Formation
• Trust Exploitation
• Trust Evolution
• Trust Decision Making
• Trust Architecture
• Recommendation and Reputation Management

All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by a minimum of three people. The accepted papers and the summary report produced by each group will be published in the post-conference proceedings (to be published by the IEEE Computer Press).

Submission Guidelines

Papers should be submitted by using IEEE format for proceedings, for more detail about the submission format check http://www.computer.org/cspress/instruct.htm.
Papers should be submitted electronically to trustsession@cis.strath.ac.uk.

Important Dates

 

Organizers

Paddy Nixon, University of Strathclyde, UK
Waleed Wagealla, University of Strathclyde, UK
Sotirios Terzis, University of Strathclyde, UK

Committee Members

Theo Dimitrakos, CLRC, UK
Paul Kearney, BT exact, UK
Sergi Robles, Spain
Christian D. Jensen, Trinity College Dublin and DTU, Denmark
Audun Josang, DSTC, Australia
Jakka Sairamesh, IBM Research, USA
Heiko Krumm, U. of Dortmund, Germany
Vinny Cahill, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Stephen Marsh, NRC, Canada
Giovanna di Marzo Serugendo, U.of Geneva
Mogens Nielsen, BRICS, U. of Aarhus, Denmark

Inquiries

Please send all inquiries regarding the trust management session to trustsession@cis.strath.ac.uk.