Mediating Between Strangers: A Trust Management Based Approach

Data sources in i-mediation, following property-based security policies, aim at supporting a wide range of potential clients, which are in general unknown in advance and may belong to heterogeneous and autonomous security domains. This raises the challenge how remote and autonomous entities can agree on a common understanding of certified properties, and other issues related to these properties (e.g. encoding formats). This paper proposes solutions that are based on secure i-mediation and a hybrid PKI model, which unifies X.509 and SPKI. We present a mediation functionality, called f-mediation. Secure f -mediation assists entities in finding partners for i-mediation and providing them with appropriate certificates and credentials. Thereby, among others, f -mediation deals with delegation and conversion of free properties into capability-like bound properties. An extension to the agent communication language KQML is used to implement the interactions among software agents in an instance of the f -mediation.