TrustBuilder2: A Reconfigurable Framework for Trust Negotiation

To date, research in trust negotiation has focused mainly on the theoretical aspects of the trust negotiation process, and the development of proof of concept implementations. These theoretical works and proofs of concept have been quite successful from a research perspective, and thus researchers must now begin to address the systems constraints that act as barriers to the deployment of these systems. To this end, we present TrustBuilder2, a fully-configurable and extensible framework for prototyping and evaluating trust negotiation systems. TrustBuilder2 leverages a plug-in based architecture, extensible data type hierarchy, and flexible communication protocol to provide a framework within which numerous trust negotiation protocols and system configurations can be quantitatively analyzed. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of TrustBuilder2, study its performance, examine the costs associated with flexible authorization systems, and leverage this knowledge to identify potential topics for future research, as well as a novel method for attacking trust negotiation systems.