Context-Sensitive Trust Evaluation in Cooperating Smart Spaces

Social networking is a dominant computing paradigm of the last decade that enables users to virtually interact and socialise, to collaborate and to share any kind of content. A drawback in current social networking systems is that they integrate poorly with the wealth of hardware and software resources that the users have access to locally or remotely. To overcome this, the Cooperating Smart Spaces (CSSs) notion has been introduced that couples the advantages of social computing with those of pervasive systems. However, as this promising merging is largely based on the collection and exploitation of various user-related information, and enables the discovery and interaction among users, groups of users and resources that are not necessarily trustworthy, a reliable trust management and evaluation system needs to be established. This chapter elaborates on such a system that has been prototyped, tested and evaluated via real user trials, in order to address the needs of CSSs. It considers context information in the trust evaluation process and it enables trust-sensitive community lifecycle and membership management; automated discovery of trusted entities; and trust-based control of personal data disclosure.