co-PIs Ninghui Li John Mitchell Brian Tung William Winsborough Marianne Winslett
Automated trust negotiation (ATN) is a new approach to access control and authentication for the open, flexible systems formed by sets of organizations that must dynamically form coalitions and work together to respond to unforeseen needs and opportunities. ATN enables open computing by assigning an access control policy to each resource that is to be made accessible to "outsiders"; an attempt to access the resource triggers a trust negotiation, consisting of the iterative, bilateral disclosure of digital credentials and related information.
This project will show that ATN is a practical solution to the access control and authentication problems of open computing systems, by resolving the most critical remaining theoretical and systems issues for the deployment of trust negotiation facilities. Specific areas that the project will address include access control policy languages for ATN, light-weight policy evaluation engines, improved ATN protocols and strategies compatible with the new languages, provable privacy and autonomy guarantees for negotiating parties, and a next-generation version of the TrustBuilder ATN prototype, demonstrating the deployment of ATN in a modular, reusable, and highly scalable implementation. These enhancements will be explored in the context of health care applications and additional scenarios supplied by the project partners.
