Socially Constructed Trust for Distributed Authorization

We describe an approach for distributed access control that is based on the idea of using a community-constructed repository of expressions of propositional attitudes. We call this repository an oracle. Members of a community may consult the oracle and use the expressions of belief and disbelief in propositions that are expressed by community members about requesters for access to resources. Our conceptual model and access control policies are described in terms of a computational logic and we describe an implementation of the approach that we advocate.