A formal model of trust lifecycle management

The rapid development of collaborative environments over the internet has highlighted new concerns over security and trust in such global computing systems. The global computing infrastructure poses an issue of uncertainty about the potential collaborators. Reaching a trusting decision in such environments encompasses both risk and trust assessments. While much work has been done in terms of modelling trust, the investigation of the management of trust lifecycle issues with consideration of both trust and risk is less examined. Our previous work addressed the dynamic aspects of trust lifecycle with a consideration of trust formation, exploitation, and evolution. In this paper we provide an approach for formalizing these aspects. As part of the formalization of the trust lifecycle, we introduce a notion of attraction to model the effect of new pieces of evidence on our opinion. The formalization described in this paper constitutes the basis of ongoing work to investigate the properties of the model.