Of web trust and policies : a suggested framework to enhance internet security

Abstract

We tend to trust people, software or anything else around us through experience or through a recommendation from a trusted source. Web voyeurs have similarly envisaged the notion of software entities roaming over the World-Wide Web capable of trusting other similar entities. Ideally, Web agents would be able to distinguish and differentiate be- tween sites, services and resources over the Internet that are reliable and worth the confidence accredited to them. In this paper we present several trust and policy frameworks built within the evolving agent mark-up languages in an at- tempt to encapsulate the Web in a new dimension of trust. Furthermore, we propose a novel mechanism that exploits existent policies, that govern servers and provide them with credentials responsible for their authentication, by extending the existent web site structure.