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http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sws/abstracts/sms04.shtml
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S.W. Smith, C. Masone, S. Sinclair.
"Expressing Trust in Distributed Systems: the Mismatch Between Tools and Reality."
Forty-Second Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing.
(Invited paper.) September 2004.
Abstract
Distributed systems typically support processes that involve humans
separated by space and by organizational boundaries. Because of its
ability to enable secure communications between parties that do not
share keys a priori, public key cryptography is a natural building
block for the elements of these computing systems to establish trust
with each other. However, if the trust structure we build into the
computing systems does not match the trust structure in the human
systems, then this trust infrastructure has not achieved its goal. In
this paper, we assess the inability of the standard PKI-based tools to
capture many trust situations that really arise in current distributed
systems, based on our labŐs experience trying to make these tools
fit. We offer some observations for future work that may improve the
situation.
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