Trust Negotiations with Customizable Anonymity

Trust negotiation makes it possible for two parties to carry on secure transactions by first establishing trust through a bilateral, iterative process of requesting and disclosing digital credentials and policies. Credentials, exchanged during trust negotiations, often contain sensitive attributes that attest to the properties of the credential owner. Uncontrolled disclosure of such sensitive attributes may cause grave damage to the credential owner. We address this problem by proposing a solution that supports anonymization of trust negotiations. Ensuring anonymity of a subject during trust negotiation is a non-trivial problem. The techniques of suppression and generalization which are used to achieve anonymity in closed systems cannot be applied to digitally signed credentials which must be tamper proof. Moreover, suppressing or generalizing sensitive attributes is often not adequate for preventing identity disclosure. Research has shown that disclosing non-sensitive attributes onl...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: IAT
• Authors: Anna Cinzia Squicciarini, Abhilasha Bhargav-Spantzel, Elisa Bertino, Elena Ferrari, Indrakshi Ray
• Keywords: Credentials, IAT 2006, Intelligent Agent, Sensitive Attributes, Trust Negotiation