REFEREE Project Homepage

REFEREE stands for Rule-controlled Environment for Evaluation of Rules, and Everything Else. It is a general mechanism for expressing and evaluating trust management policies. In this project, we are applying this mechanism to solve the trust management problems that exist in the World Wide Web today. Through our implementation, we hope to get a better understanding about trust management, the World Wide Web, and how REFEREE bridges the two.

This project is being implemented by Yang-hua Chu as his master thesis at MIT. Below you will find more information about REFEREE, as well as some implementation notes, progress reports, and demonstrations.

6/16/97:

• The third source release (in tar-gzip format) of the REFEREE sample implementation. It is pretty big (~1.8M) because it contains the Jigsaw Proxy. Please read the instruction on how to install and run the sample code. There is no documentation on the source release yet. However, my thesis provides a good overview of REFEREE and the architecture of the reference implementation.

6/13/97:

• I handed in my Master of Engineering thesis today! It is titled "Trust Management for the World Wide Web." Thesis is available on-line in HTML format.
• My thesis was created using Microsoft Word 97. I recommend Word 97 format (~800K) or Rich-text format (RTF, ~9MB) for viewing with better document layout.

4/7/97:

• REFEREE is presented in the Sixth International World Wide Web Conference. Slides are available in PowerPoint or in HTML format.
• Pointer to the REFEREE paper, by Chu, Y., Feigenbaum, J., LaMacchia B., Resnick, P., Strauss, M.
• Pointer to [BFL96] paper: M. Blaze, J. Feigenbaum, J. Lacy, Decentralized Trust Management, first appeared in Proceedings of the 1996 Symposium on Security and Privacy, pp. 164-173

2/10/97:

• Second source release of REFEREE sample implementation. Please read the instruction on how to install the text-based REFEREE demo.

12/13/96:

• REFEREE on-line demo-1.2. It contains the sample policies described in the paper "REFEREE: Trust Management for Web Applications". The paper is being submitted to WWW6 conference.

12/4/96:

• Yang-hua gave a presentation on Trust Management in the World Wide Web to CIS (Cryptography and Internet Security) student seminar on December 4. Click here to see the presentation slides.

11/19/96:

• Check out the first working demo of REFEREE! Best of all, it is all on-line: no download, no compliation.
• First source release of REFEREE sample implementation. Please read the instruction on how to install REFEREE demo.

11/8/96:

• REFEREE-1.4d specification.

10/25/96:

• REFEREE-1.4 specification.

The predecessor of REFEREE is PTMK (PICS Trust Management Kernel). The work below was based on this architecture, which may be outdated.

10/11/96:

• Writing on interfacing PTMK with Jigsaw and HotJava.
• Remarks on PICS Label Syntax 1.1.

9/27/96:

• Proposal for this project.