Patent ID: 8302165

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for establishing a trust relationship between a trust authority and a target computer system, the method comprising: receiving a request to provision the target computer system; separating work in response to the request into a provisioning phase and a configuration phase, wherein the provisioning phase can be performed entirely on the trust authority and the configuration phase can be performed entirely on the target computer system requesting trust so that the two phases can be performed at different times and do not assume any connection between the trust authority and the target computer system; during the provisioning phase, verifying the received request with the trust authority to ensure that the requestor has sufficient permission to establish the trust relationship; modifying a trust authority store to store information about a new trust relationship between the trust authority and the target computer system; packaging data related to the trust relationship into a data blob for communication to a target configuration component, wherein the data blob contains information for configuring the trust relationship on the target computer system without additional communication with the trust authority; and sending a response to the received request that includes the packaged trust relationship data for communication to the target computer system for completion of the configuration phase, wherein the preceding steps are performed by at least one computer system.