Middleware Services for Trusted Coordination

As more interactions are migrating to use Internet based communications, the level of dependence on external parties is increasing. This raises complex issues regarding which resources, services and agents you can trust. Interactions could be consumer/producer oriented where one particular organisation utilises a service provided by another. Furthermore it could be of a more collaborative nature where multiple parties working towards a common goal, require mechanisms for accessing each others information. Trusted coordination ensures that these interactions can be trusted even if there is mutual distrust present between parties. Distributed system construction is now moving towards the use of component oriented middleware. Current component middleware has limited provision for trust management and no specific facilities for coordinating collaborative work. This document describes on going research work on developing a component middleware for applications requiring trusted