Federation and attestation of online reputations

摘要

Techniques for federating and for attesting to online reputations are provided. An online reputation is a numerical representation of a reliability or risk factor associated with the performance of an online transaction involving a particular principal. A principal is a specific type of online resource that has one or more identities where each identity is capable of having one or more reputations. A variety of reputation sources supply (320) portions of reputation information about a principal. The portions arc aggregated (330) and optionally weighted (332) to form a summary of reputation information. The summary is then represented as an attestation (350) and optionally signed (351) by the service providing the attestation.