On the Characterisation of a Trusting Agent — Aspects of a Formal Approach

The rapid increase in the use of open distributed systems has given rise to a number of important issues for computer scientists, some of which concern the organisation of interactions between computers, between humans, and between humans and computers. For instance, such interactions are the focus of attention in access control policies (Abadi et al., 1993), and in cryptographic protocols (Burrows et al., 1990), both of which specify the actions that are to be performed by the participating agents.