of a trust relationship, which denotes a mutual a priori relationship between the involved organizations or parties wherein the parties believe that the other parties will behave correctly even in the future.
An important observation for NSIS is that a certain degree of trust has to be placed into intermediate NSIS nodes along the path between an NSIS Initiator and an NSIS Responder, specifically so that they perform message processing and take the necessary actions. A complete lack of trust between any of the participating entities will cause NSIS signaling to fail.
Note that it is not possible to describe a trust model completely without considering the details and behavior of the NTLP, the NSLP (e.g., QoS NSLP), and the deployment environment. For example, securing the communication between an end host (which acts as the NSIS Initiator) and the first NSIS node (which might be in the attached network or even a number of networks away) is impacted by the trust relationships between these entities. In a corporate network environment, a stronger degree of trust typically exists than in an unmanaged network.
Figure 1 introduces convenient abbreviations for network parts with similar properties: first-peer, last-peer, intra-domain, or inter-domain.