A Trusted W3 Model:
Transitivity of Trust in a Heterogeneous Web Environment

Yinan Yang, Electronic Commerce, Medibank Private, Canberra ACT Australia, yyang@medibank.com.au

Lawrie Brown, Australian Defense Force Academy, Canberra ACT Australia, Lawrie.Brown@adfa.edu.au.

Jan Newmarch, University of Canberra, Canberra ACT Australia, jan@ise.canberra.edu.au.

Ed Lewis, Australian Defense Force Academy, Canberra ACT Australia, e-lewis@adfa.edu.au.

Keywords

W3 Trust Model, heterogeneous environment, trust value, trust attributes, transitivity of trust, Web document, trust management, Web security, scalable trust, metadata.

Abstract

The major industrially adopted public key trust models are primarily hierarchically structured to form a vertically trusted environment (eg. X.509), whereas most web documents are hypertext linked to form a horizontally referral (or web-linked) environment. By introducing a set of trust attributes in such a heterogeneous environment, transitivity of trust can be implemented. The proposed Trusted W3 Model described in this paper combines a vertically trusted public key infrastructure with a horizontally referral Web classification of trust metadata.

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