Marco Casassa Mont

Trust Services are an emerging enabler for e-commerce. They deliver trust and confidence at various stages of business interaction, including: establishing and maintaining trust, negotiations, contract formation, fulfilment, collaboration, through to dispute resolution. However, there are significant technical and business problems to overcome. Trust service providers must be accountable for the service they provide and, because disputes can occur many years after a transaction, they must be around for the long term. Finally, to be successful, their services must make life simpler for e-commerce participants.

This project explores the advantages and problems presented by trust services. The authors are working on some of the technology problems, which is a necessary first step to realising a full trust services infrastructure. Figure below shows our view of trust services usages through business processes.

As part of this project a long-term trusted storage service (Persistent Active Storage Service - PAST Service) has been researched and developed to deal with long-term storage and management of critical digital documents . In this context, the main research topics are: survivability of data and services, long-term privacy and access control, long-term confidentiality and integrity.

Further information and details about this project and area of investigation can be found in the following HPL Technical Report:

• HPL-2001-198 Adrian Baldwin, Yolanta Beres, Marco Casassa Mont, Simon Shiu -  Trust Services: a Trust Infrastructure for E-Commerce - HPL-2001-198, 2001