Accountability and Trust in Cooperative Information Systems

Summary form only given. Cooperation and trust play an increasingly important role in today's information systems. For instance, peer-to-peer systems like BitTorrent, Sopcast and Skype are powered by resource contributions from participating users, federated systems like the Internet have to respect the interests, policies and laws of participating organizations and countries; in the Cloud, users entrust their data and computation to third-part infrastructure. In this talk, we consider accountability as a way to facilitate transparency and trust in cooperative systems. We look at practical techniques to account for the integrity of distributed, cooperative computations, and look at some of the difficulties and open problems in accountability.