GEM : a distributed goal evaluation algorithm for trust management

Trust Management (TM) is an approach to distributed access control where access decisions are based on policy statements issued by multiple principals and stored in a distributed manner. Most of the existing goal evaluation algorithms for TM either rely on a centralized evaluation strategy, which consists of collecting all the relevant policy statements in a single location (and therefore they do not guarantee the confidentiality of intensional policies), or do not detect the termination of the computation (i.e., when all the answers of a goal are computed). In this paper we present GEM, a distributed goal evaluation algorithm for TM systems. GEM detects termination in a completely distributed way without the need of disclosing intensional policies, thereby preserving their confidentiality. We demonstrate that the algorithm terminates and is sound and complete w.r.t. the standard semantics for logic programs.