What is Trust Analysis?
Trust analysis involves examining trust relationships to identify situations of interest. There are a wide variety of situations that may be of concern to the system administrator and our view is that conflicts and redundancies/ambiguities are normally of utmost concern. A conflict is defined as the scenario that arises as a result of two assertions of different polarities (positive and negative), the same action set and referring to the same trustor and trustee. A redundancy or ambiguity is defined as the state in which two assertions, of the same type (trust or recommendation), have the same trustor, trustee and action sets and levels are of the same polarity, but different values. Our viewpoint on trust analysis is purposefully general, in order to allow different organizations the diversity and flexibility that they require in defining their analysis requirements. In our model, there is a distinction made between source analysis and analysis of actual scenarios.
