To date, "Web Security" has been associated with debates over cryptographic technology, protocols and public policy, obscuring the wider challenges of building trusted Web applications. Since the Web aims at being an information space that reflects not just human knowledge but also human relationships, it will soon realize the full complexity of trust relationships among people, computers and organizations. This has led to a new breed of systems – electronic trust management systems – which are quickly becoming an indispensable component of every successful digital community. Trust Management (TM) is an emerging framework for decentralizing security decisions that help developers and others in asking "why" trust is granted rather than immediately focusing on "how†cryptography can enforce it. Trust management is an attempt to design and evaluate reliable systems whose objective is to help create trust among online communities. The efficacy and sustainability of new age Internet applications that facilitate community building on the Internet – wiki, blogs, collaborative publishing, virtual communities – are essentially based on mutual trust among the participants. Given the anonymity one can enjoy on the Internet and the virtual nature of the WWW space, the significance of trust management need not be overemphasized. Trust is a precondition for the continued existence of any market or organization or a community in general. Furthermore, several properties of online interaction are challenging the accumulated wisdom of our communities on how to create trust and calls for the development of new mechanisms and systems. This book attempts to do just about that by providing insights into this new emerging framework on the Internet.
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