Trust: Benefits, Models, and Mechanisms

Trust provides many practical benefits in open distributed systems. It enables cooperation between pairs of entities, provides a safe and inexpensive basis for lowering access barriers to secured resources, and facilitates complex transactions among multiple entities. In this paper, we describe a wide range of notions and aspects of trust in open systems, with particular focus on trust between autonomous entities. We argue for computational models and mechanisms that enable trust between entities to be produced, manipulated and degraded and we summarize the state-of-the-art from this perspective.