Data Trustees: A Whitelisting Approach for Trusted Data Sharing

In an increasingly connected digital world, the strategic use of data is critical to improving predictive accuracy, optimizing processes, and driving innovative business models. Data spaces can facilitate sovereign and secure data sharing across multiple organizations. A challenge in this environment is the lack of trust among data space participants, calling for independent data trustees. However, finding and selecting an appropriate data trustee can be difficult and is usually a manual process. Our research addresses this challenge by introducing a whitelisting approach for automatically selecting appropriate data trustees within a data space. We report on the results of an ongoing design science research project and describe the development of extensions to the Eclipse Dataspace Components, which enable the application of the whitelisting approach. These extensions are designed to support secure, efficient, and trusted data sharing. Our findings can support practitioners in the data space community in implementing robust mechanisms for selecting data trustees, thereby improving the functionality and trustworthiness of data spaces.