Distributed Knowledge Authorization Language (DKAL). Managing Policies and Trust

With the advent of cloud computing, the necessity arises to manage policies and trust automatically and efficiently. In a brick-and-mortar (B&M) setting, clerks learn unwritten policies from trustworthy peers. And if they don't know a policy, they know whom to ask. In the B&Mto-cloud transition, the clerks disappear. Policies have to be explicit and managed automatically. The more challenging problem yet is how to handle the interaction of the policies of distrustful principals, especially in federated scenarios where there is no central authority. The Distributed Knowledge Authorization Language (DKAL) was created to deal with such problems. We give a quick introduction to DKAL.