Trust Negotiation in Electronic Markets

As business transactions migrate into electronic marketplaces, most interactions will occur between strangers. In order for strangers to conduct secure transactions, a sufficient level of mutual trust must be established. A new approach to gradually establishing trust between strangers is through the iterative exchange of digital credentials, known as trust negotiation. This paper briefly describes TrustBuilder, an architecture for automated trust negotiation that we are designing and developing. It also introduces client-initiated trust establishment, a new context for trust negotiation that has not been explored previously. When a client sends a request to a server, the request can sometimes contain sensitive content that the client must safeguard. The client must establish trust in the server before the request is sent. This paper presents the design of an architecture for client-initiated trust establishment and describes how the architecture can be used to address privacy concerns, a significant impediment to conducting on-line business transactions