Measuring eTrust in distributed systems - General Concept and Application to Internet Voting

Emerging digital environments and infrastructures, such as distributed services and computing services, have generated new options of communication, information sharing, and resource utilization in past years. Different distributed trust concepts are applied to increase trust in such systems. However, these concepts yield to rather complex architectures which make it difficult to determine which component or system needs to be trusted. This paper presents a novel trust measurement method for distributed systems which enables the t identification of weak points in the overall system architecture. The measurement method includes the specification of a formal trust language and its representation by means of propositional logic formulas. The applicability of the proposed concepts is demonstrated by conducting a case study on the Internet voting system that was used in the 2007 parliamentary elections in Estonia.