Abstract

This thesis challenges the assumption that policies will "play fair" within trust negotiation. Policies that do not "play fair" contain requirements for authentication that are misleading, irrelevant, and/or incorrect, based on the current transaction context. To detect these unfair policies, trust negotiation ontologies provide the context to determine the relevancy of a given credential set for a particular negotiation. We propose a credential relevancy framework for use in trust negotiation that utilizes ontologies to process the set of all available credentials C and produce a subset of credentials C' relevant to the context of a given negotiation. This credential relevancy framework reveals the credentials inconsistent with the current negotiation and detects potentially malicious policies that request these credentials. It provides a general solution for detecting policies that do not "play fair," such as those used in credential phishing attacks, malformed policies, and malicious strategies. This thesis motivates the need for a credential relevancy framework, outlines considerations for designing and implementing it (including topics that require further research), and analyzes a prototype implementation. The credential relevancy framework prototype, analyzed in this thesis, has the following two properties: first, it incurs less than 10% extra execution time compared to a baseline trust negotiation prototype (e.g., TrustBuilder); second, credential relevance determination does not compromise the desired goals of trust negotiation—transparent and automated authentication in open systems. Current trust negotiation systems integrated with a credential relevancy framework will be enabled to better defend against users that do not always "play fair" by incorporating a credential relevancy framework.

Degree

MS

College and Department

Physical and Mathematical Sciences; Computer Science

Rights

http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Date Submitted

2005-08-29

Document Type

Thesis

Handle

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd1007

Keywords

trust negotiation, policies, malicious, attacks, framework, privacy, security

Language

English

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