Implementation of an agent-oriented trust management infrastructure based on a hybrid PKI model

Access control in modern computing environments is different from access control in the traditional setting of operating systems. For distributed computing systems, specification and enforcement of permissions can be based on a public key infrastructure which deals with public keys for asymmetric cryptography. Previous approaches and their implementations for applying a public key infrastructure are classified as based either on trusted authorities with licencing or on owners with delegations. We present the architecture and main features of a trust management infrastructure based on a hybrid model which unifies and extends the previous public key infrastructure approaches. The trust management infrastructure constitutes a flexible framework for experimenting with the applications of different trust models.