Quantifying and Improving Robustness of Trust Systems

Trust and reputation systems are widely used, facilitating interactions among agents based on trust evaluation. These systems may have robustness issues, which should be paid attention. Various attacks in existing trust and reputation systems have been identified. Designers of trust systems propose methods to defend against these attacks. However, they typically verify the robustness of their defense mechanisms (or trust models) only under specific attacks. This raises problems: First, the robustness of their models is not guaranteed as they do not consider all attacks. Second, the comparison between two trust models depends on the choice of specific attacks, introducing bias. We propose to quantify the strength of attacks, and to quantify the robustness of systems based on the strength of the attacks it can resist. Our quantification is based on information theory. Our approach provides designers of trust systems a fair measurement of the robustness. Categories and Subject Descri...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Dongxia Wang
• Keywords: ATAL 2015, Intelligent Agents