Patent ID: 7596700

Claim:
A method for establishing trust between mutually mistrusting first and second entities, wherein each entity includes an electronic data collection of data and each desires to build trust with the other so that information stored on their respective data collections may be shared in a trusting environment, the method comprising: determining a first signature for a first data array selected from a portion of a first data element stored on the data collection of the first entity; determining a second signature for a second data array selected from a portion of a second data element stored on the data collection of the second entity; generating a signature correlation value for the first and second signatures, the signature correlation value indicating a measure of data array commonality between the first and second signatures; establishing a level of trust based on the signature correlation value; identifying respective first and second portions of the first and second electronic data collections that have not been relied upon to establish the level of trust; and determining which portions of the first and second portions are eligible for sharing between the entities as a function of the level of trust.