Trust Scheme Interoperability: Connecting Heterogeneous Trust Schemes

Abstract

The growing interconnectedness of computer systems has led to the need for a flexible approach to trust management. Many countries operate trust schemes to enable the automated assessment of the trustworthiness of information. But this assessment remains a challenge if the information was issued in a foreign trust scheme. An issue is the lack of a root of trust shared between the trust schemes. Other challenges are the heterogeneity of trust models used by entities operating in different legal and cultural environments. In this paper, we present a novel approach to facilitate the interoperability between different trust schemes. In our approach, trust scheme operators take legal agreements that exist between two countries and publish them as a machine-readable trust recognition. Additionally, a scheme operator codifies the rules for trust recognition of the other scheme in the form of a trust translation. Using this information, a trust verifier maps trust data from the other scheme into its own scheme. This allows a verifier to automatically process transactions from other trust schemes in a trustworthy way.