GroupTrust: Dependable Trust Management

As advanced computing and communication technologies penetrate every aspect of our life, we have witnessed the persistent growth of open systems where entities interact with one another without prior knowledge or experiences. Trust becomes an important metric in such open systems. This paper presents a dependable trust management scheme—GroupTrust, and a working system to support GroupTrust. It makes three original contributions. First, we identify a set of vulnerabilities that are common in existing reputation based trust models. We show that reputation trust built solely on direct experiences or by combining direct experiences with uniform trust propagation can be vulnerable. Second, we develop GroupTrust, a dependable trust management scheme to provide reliable trust management in the presence of dishonest ratings, malicious camouflage, and malicious collusive behaviors. The GroupTrust scheme is novel in two aspects: (i) we develop a pairwise similarity based feedback credibility to enhance the resilience of trust computation in the presence of dishonest ratings; (ii) we propose to propagate trust based on a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model, which defines trust propagation threshold to control how trust should be propagated. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of GroupTrust against four threat models using both simulated and real world datasets. Our experimental results show that feedback credibility based local trust computation can effectively constrain strategically malicious participants from taking advantages of their dishonest ratings. SIR-based trust propagation control enables safe trust propagation and blocks irrational trust propagation. We show that GroupTrust scheme significantly outperforms other trust models in terms of both performance and attack resilience in the presence of dishonest feedbacks, sparse feedbacks, and strategically malicious participants against four representative threat models.