Abstract: In this talk, we will present Trust-X, a comprehensive XML-based framework for trust negotiations. Trust negotiation is a promising approach for establishing trust in open systems like the Internet, where sensitive interactions may often occur between entities at first contact, with no prior knowledge of each other. The framework we propose takes into account all aspects related to negotiations, from the specification of the profiles and policies of the involved parties to the selection of the best strategy to succeed in the negotiation.

Trust-X has a number of innovative features, such as the support for protection of sensitive policies, the use of trust tickets to speed up the negotiation, and the support of different strategies to carry on a negotiation. In this talk, besides presenting the language to encode security information, we present the system architecture and algorithms according to which negotiations can take place and we outline the on-going work.

Short Bio: Elisa Bertino is professor of Computer Science and of Electrical and Computer Engineering (courtesy appointment) at Purdue University and serves as Research Director of CERIAS. She is also a faculty member at Department of Computer Science and Communication of the University of Milan where she is the director of the DB&SEC laboratory. She has been a visiting researcher at the IBM Research Laboratory (now Almaden) in San Jose, at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, at Rutgers University, at Telcordia Technologies.

Her main research interests include security, privacy, database systems, object-oriented technology, multimedia systems. In those areas, Prof. Bertino has published more than 250 papers in all major refereed journals, and in proceedings of international conferences and symposia. She is a co-author of the books "Object-Oriented Database Systems - Concepts and Architectures" 1993 (Addison-Wesley International Publ.), "Indexing Techniques for Advanced Database Systems" 1997 (Kluwer Academic Publishers), and "Intelligent Database Systems" 2001 (Addison-Wesley International Publ.). She is a co-editor in chief of the Very Large Database Systems (VLDB) Journal and a member of the advisory board of the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. She serves also on the editorial boards of several scientific journals, incuding IEEE Internet Computing, ACM Transactions on Information and System Security, Acta Informatica, the Parallel and Distributed Database Journal, the Journal of Computer Security, Data & Knowledge Engineering, the International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems, Science of Computer Programming. She has been consultant to several italian companies on data management systems and applications and has given several courses to industries. She is involved in several projects sponsored by the EU. She has served as Program Committee members of several international conferences, such as ACM SIGMOD, VLDB, ACM OOPSLA, as Program Co-Chair of the 1998 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), as program chair of 2000 European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2000), and as program chair of the 7th ACM Symposium of Access Control Models and Technologies (SACMAT 2002).