A Critical Comparison of Trusted Computing and Trust Management Technologies

Mainly justified by the growing concern about vulnerabilities of IT systems, some new technologies are being integrated into computing devices, for realizing so-called Trusted Computing systems. However, they are raising questions about intrusive cyber-control over individual user activities and data, but also about consequences in cyber-war scenarios. The aim of this article is to confront Trusted Computing systems with distributed Trust Management systems, which realize access control for local resources on the basis of delegation of access rights, according to local trust decisions. Both technologies are discussed from various points of view: architecture, vision, ethics, politics and law. Some experimentations are also presented, to show the applicability of Trust Management techniques to modern Service-Oriented Architectures.