Patent ID: 7316027

Claim:
A method for dynamically establishing trust relationships, comprising: acquiring a community list for a requesting principal via an identity service, wherein the community list includes one or more different principals with which the requesting principal can permissibly establish a trust relationship and wherein the community list identifies other principals that the requesting principal may not engage in other trusted relationships with and the community list also includes conditions for particular ones of the one or more different principals that are to be satisfied before the trust relationship with those particular ones are permitted to proceed; dynamically maintaining the community list separate from the principal via the identity service in a trust configuration associated with the requesting principal, and wherein the trust configuration includes a threshold limitations which cannot be exceeded by the requesting principal, and wherein hard limitations with respect to communications with the one or more different principals and which are defined in the trust configuration cannot be expanded by the requesting principal but the requesting principal can add more restrictive limitations to a version of the trust configuration being maintained by the requesting principal; and transmitting the community list and a copy of the trust configuration to the requesting principal, and wherein the identity service is an intermediary between the requesting principal and one of the one or more different principals.