Multi-level delegations with trust management in access control systems

Delegation is a mechanism that allows one agent to act on another's privilege. It is important that the privileges should be delegated to a person who is trustworthy. In this paper, we propose a multi-level delegation model with trust management in access control systems.We organize the delegation tasks into three levels, Low, Medium, and High, according to the sensitivity of the information contained in the delegation tasks. It motivates us that the more sensitive the delegated task is, the more trustworthy the delegatee should be. In order to assess how trustworthy a delegatee is, we devise trust evaluation techniques to describe a delegatee's trust history and also predict the future trend of trust. In our proposed delegation model, a delegatee with a higher trust level could be assigned with a higher level delegation task. Extensive experiments show that our proposed multi-level delegation model is effective in accurately predicting trust and avoiding sensitive information disclosure. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012.