It is well understood that using a software component methodology can simplify the development and maintenance of systems. Web services allow this vision to be extended allowing components to be made available on the Internet. This paper proposes the use of trust services as third party web services that allow trust operations to be extracted from solutions and packaged as components. This has obvious advantages in simplifying the task of engendering trust in solutions — both during their creation and in simplifying the maintenance.

The paper further argues that using a web service model supports re-usability of not only the software but also the operational environment where the software runs. This operational environment is considered particularly critical in providing security and trust operations.