Nowadays, information technologies provide users ability to work with anyone, at any time, from everywhere and with several heterogeneous devices. This evolution fosters a new distributed trustworthy collaboration model where users can work on shared documents with whom they trust. Multi-synchronous collaboration is widely used for supporting collaborative work by maintaining simultaneous streams of user activities which continually diverge and converge. However, this model lacks support on how usage restrictions on data can be expressed and checked within the model. This thesis proposes ''C-PPC'', a multi-synchronous contract-based and trust-aware collaboration model. In this model, contracts are used as usage rules and users collaborate according to trust levels they have on others computed according to contract compliance. We formalize contracts by using deontic concepts: permission, obligation and prohibition. Contracts are enclosed in logs of operations over shared data. The C-PPC model provides a mechanism for merging data changes and contracts. Any user can audit logs at any time and auditing results are used to update user trust levels based on a trust metric. We propose a solution relying on hash-chain based authenticators that ensures integrity of logs and user accountability. We provide algorithms for constructing authenticators and verifying logs and prove their correctness. A set of experimental results shows the feasibility of the C-PPC model.
