Probabilistic trust has been adopted as an approach to taking security sensitive decisions in modern global computing environments. Existing probabilistic trust frameworks either assume fixed behaviour for the principals or incorporate the notion of ‘decay’ as an ad hoc approach to cope with their dynamic behaviour. Using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) for both modelling and approximating the behaviours of principals, we introduce the HMM-based trust model as a new approach to evaluating trust in systems exhibiting dynamic behaviour. This model avoids the fixed behaviour assumption which is considered the major limitation of existing Beta trust model. We show the consistency of the HMM-based trust model and contrast it against the well known Beta trust model with the decay principle in terms of the estimation precision.