MECHANISM FOR EVALUATING SECURITY RISKS

Described is a mechanism for collectively evaluating security risks associated with loading an application. A hosting environment associated with loading the application invokes a trust manager (505) to evaluate the security risks. The trust manager invokes a plurality of trust evaluators, where each trust evaluator is responsible for analyzing and assessing a different security risk (507). Upon completion of each security risk evaluation, results of those individual security risk evaluations are returned to the trust manager.(511) The trust manager aggregates the variety of security risk evaluation results and makes a security determination based on the aggregated evaluation results.(513) That determination may be to move forward with loading the application, to block the load of the application, or perhaps to prompt the user for a decision about whether to move forward with the load.