Plenary Lecture

Autonomic Trust Management for Component Software Platform

Ms. Zheng Yan
Nokia Research Center, Helsinki
Finland
zheng.z.yan@nokia.com

Abstract: Trust plays an important role in a software system, especially when the system is component based and varies due to component joining and leaving. How to manage trust in such a system is crucial for an embedded device, such as a mobile device. This speech introduces a trustworthy middleware architecture that can manage trust in an autonomic way through adopting a number of algorithms for trust assessment and maintenance with regard to software component downloading and execution.
We adopt a holistic notion of trust which includes several properties, such as security, availability and reliability, depending on the requirements of a trustor. Hence trust is the assessment of a trustor on how well the observed behavior (e.g. quality attributes) of a trustee meets the trustor’s own standards for an intended purpose.
Based on this notion of trust, we analyze the trust issues of component software. Then, we develop a comprehensive trust model to specify, evaluate, set up and maintain trust relationships that exist among platform entities. We further design a trust management framework that is embedded into the component software middleware platform in order to manage the trustworthiness of various system entities. This framework adopts a number of algorithms towards autonomic trust management. These algorithms are designed based on the trust model and include such algorithms as: trust prediction for component software downloading and installation; trust assessment at runtime; control mode prediction and selection, and adaptive trust control model adjustment. Through applying these algorithms, the trust management framework can support autonomic trust management for a component software platform.
Finally, the speech identifies emerging trends about trust management and proposes future work regarding the trustworthy platform for component software.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Zheng Yan is a senior research scientist in the trustworthy communications and identity research team at the Nokia Research Center, Helsinki. She is a member of the IEEE and the IEEE Computer Society. Her research interests are trust modeling and management; trusted computing and communications; security, dependability and trustworthiness of software platform. She holds two M.Eng degrees and received her licentiate (pre-doctor) degree at the Helsinki University of Technology. Her Ph.D dissertation is about trust management for mobile computing platforms.