A novel trust service provider for Internet based commerce applications

In this paper we present a framework for enhancing trust in Internet commerce. Experience shows that efficient cryptographic protocols are not enough to guarantee peoples' confidence in Internet commerce; the transacting parties must also trust each other. Hence, the main ingredient missing in today's e-commerce infrastructures is modeling and implementing trust. Several attempts have been made to provide secure and trusted protocols but few have seen any practical use. This paper shows how trust can be provided through a network of Trust Service Providers (TSp). We have identified a set of services that should be offered by a TSp. We also present a distributed object-oriented implementation of trust services using CORBA, JAVA and XML.