分布式信任评估研究

在信息和服务爆炸的时代,分布式的信任评估技术作为一种新的解决方案,引起了广泛关注并取得了许多重要成果。针对分布式信任评估中的难点与关键点,在介绍现有模型的解决手段时,指出了目前仍遗留的一些问题。     

网上拍卖中信任模型的研究综述

网上拍卖的匿名性以及不确定性是网上欺诈行为不断增加的重要客观因素,因此,建立一个完善的信任模型成为网上拍卖中亟待解决的问题。归纳了网上拍卖中受主、客观因素影响的信任概念模型,探讨了当今拍卖网站主要采用的信任模型以及存在的问题。列举了当前改进的信任计算模型,包括基于社会学理论的信任模型、基于统计的信任模型、基于概率的信任模型、基于不确定性理论的信任模型、基于语义的信任模型和基于网格的信任模型;在对上述模型的优势和不足进行具体分析的基础上,展望了未来信任模型的发展方向。     

E-commerce trust metrics and models

Traditional models of trust between vendors and buyers fall short of requirements for an electronic marketplace, where anonymous transactions cross territorial and legal boundaries as well as traditional value-chain structures. Alternative quantifications of trust may offer better evaluations of transaction risk in this environment. This article introduces a notion of quantifiable trust and then develops models that can use these metrics to verify e-commerce transactions in ways that might be able to satisfy the requirements of mutual trust. The article uses two examples in illustrating these concepts: one for an e-commerce printing enterprise and the other for Internet stock trading     

Parameter learning of personalized trust models in broker-based distributed trust management

Distributed trust management addresses the challenges of eliciting, evaluating and propagating trust for service providers on the distributed network. By delegating trust management to brokers, individual users can share their feedbacks for services without the overhead of maintaining their own ratings. This research proposes a two-tier trust hierarchy, in which a user relies on her broker to provide reputation rating about any service provider, while brokers leverage their connected partners in aggregating the reputation of unfamiliar service providers. Each broker collects feedbacks from its users on past transactions. To accommodate individual differences, personalized trust is modeled with a Bayesian network. Training strategies such as the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm can be deployed to estimate both server reputation and user bias. This paper presents the design and implementation of a distributed trust simulator, which supports experiments under different configurations. In addition, we have conducted experiments to show the following. 1) Personal rating error converges to below 5% consistently within 10,000 transactions regardless of the training strategy or bias distribution. 2) The choice of trust model has a significant impact on the performance of reputation prediction. 3) The two-tier trust framework scales well to distributed environments. In summary, parameter learning of trust models in the broker-based framework enables both aggregation of feedbacks and personalized reputation prediction.

Towards a trust,reputation and recommendation meta model

New trust, reputation and recommendation (TRR) models are continuously proposed. However, the existing models lack shared bases and goals. For this reason, in this work we define an innovative meta model to facilitate the definition and standardization of a generic TRR model. Following the meta model, researchers in the field will be able to define standard models, compare them with other models and reuse parts of them. A standardization is also needed to determine which properties should be present in a TRR model.In accordance with the objectives we were seeking, following our meta model, we have defined a pre-standardized TRR model for e-commerce, identified the fundamental concepts and the main features that contribute to form trust and reputation in that domain, respected the dependence on the context/role of trust and reputation, aggregated only homogeneous trust information; listed and shown how to defend from the main malicious attacks.     

网格环境下的信任评估模型研究*

在对目前典型信任评估模型进行分析的基础上,针对信任概念的不同理解观点,讨论了两种源于不同思想的信任评估模型;最后分析了它们各自运算的合理性,为信任评估研究提供了一个有价值的新思路。最后分析了两种模型的不足及信任评估今后的研究方向。     

An architectural approach for decentralized trust management

To guard against malicious peers, peer-to-peer applications must incorporate suitable trust mechanisms. Current decentralized trust-management research focuses mainly on producing trust models and algorithms, whereas the actual composition of trust models into real applications has been largely unexplored. The practical architectural approach for composing egocentric trust (Pace) provides detailed design guidance on where and how developers can incorporate trust models into decentralized applications. In addition, Pace's guiding principles promote countermeasures against threats to decentralized systems. Several prototypes demonstrate the approach's use and feasibility.     

电子商务系统信任管理研究综述*

通过分析目前电子商务信任模型的研究现状,总结出了研究信任模型的主要方法,讨论了信任研究中所涉及的各种问题,并指出了下一步研究的方向和思路。     

基于蚁群算法的加强型可抵御攻击信任管理模型

通过将网络节点推荐行为分析和网络恶意节点密度的自适应机制纳入信誉度评价过程,提出了基于蚁群算法的加强型可抵御攻击信任管理模型--EAraTRM,以解决传统信任模型因较少考虑节点的推荐欺骗行为而导致容易在恶意节点的合谋攻击影响下失准的问题。在对比研究中发现,EAraTRM可以在网络中恶意节点密度达到90%,其他传统信任模型已经失效的情况下,仍保持较高的正确性。实验结果表明,EAraTRM能提高节点评价其他节点信誉度时的精度,并降低整个网络中恶意节点间进行合谋攻击的成功率。     

Fuzzy computational models for trust and reputation systems

In the recent past, a considerable research has been devoted to trust and reputation mechanisms to simplify complex transactions for open environments in social networking, e-commerce, and recommender systems (RS). In real life, we come to know about others through our social circle according to their reputation which is a public view. However, it is not always adequate to depend solely on the public view and therefore a trust measure is required to give a personalized view of the future encounters with a specific partner. In this paper, we propose fuzzy computational models for both trust and reputation concepts. Reciprocity and experience are used for trust modeling while the proposed reputation model is a fuzzy extension of beta reputation model. A two-level filtering methodology is proposed to benefit to a large extent from both the concepts separately. In order to justify the proposed models, we compared them with the existing reputation models for movie RS. The experimental results show that the incorporation of trust and reputation concepts into RS indeed improves the recommendation accuracy and establish that our models are better than beta and the popular eBay reputation models.     

Learning to trust in the competence and commitment of agents

For agents to collaborate in open multi-agent systems, each agent must trust in the other agents’ ability to complete tasks and willingness to cooperate. Agents need to decide between cooperative and opportunistic behavior based on their assessment of another agents’ trustworthiness. In particular, an agent can have two beliefs about a potential partner that tend to indicate trustworthiness: that the partner is competent and that the partner expects to engage in future interactions. This paper explores an approach that models competence as an agent’s probability of successfully performing an action, and models belief in future interactions as a discount factor. We evaluate the underlying decision framework’s performance given accurate knowledge of the model’s parameters in an evolutionary game setting. We then introduce a game-theoretic framework in which an agent can learn a model of another agent online, using the Harsanyi transformation. The learning agents evaluate a set of competing hypotheses about another agent during the simulated play of an indefinitely repeated game. The Harsanyi strategy is shown to demonstrate robust and successful online play against a variety of static, classic, and learning strategies in a variable-payoff Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma setting.     

A simulation testbed for analyzing trust and reputation mechanisms in unreliable online markets

Modern online markets are becoming extremely dynamic, indirectly dictating the need for (semi-) autonomous approaches for constant monitoring and immediate action in order to satisfy one’s needs/preferences. In such open and versatile environments, software agents may be considered as a suitable metaphor for dealing with the increasing complexity of the problem. Additionally, trust and reputation have been recognized as key issues in online markets and many researchers have, in different perspectives, surveyed the related notions, mechanisms and models. Within the context of this work we present an adaptable, multivariate agent testbed for the simulation of open online markets and the study of various factors affecting the quality of the service consumed. This testbed, which we call Euphemus, is highly parameterized and can be easily customized to suit a particular application domain. It allows for building various market scenarios and analyzing interesting properties of e-commerce environments from a trust perspective. The architecture of Euphemus is presented and a number of well-known trust and reputation models are built with Euphemus, in order to show how the testbed can be used to apply and adapt models. Extensive experimentation has been performed in order to show how models behave in unreliable online markets, results are discussed and interesting conclusions are drawn.     

Integrating trust measures in multiagent systems

Several models have been proposed in the past for representing both reliability and reputation. However, we remark that a crucial point in the practical use of these two measures is represented by the possibility of suitably combining them to support the agent's decision. In the past, we proposed a reliability–reputation model, called RRAF, that allows the user to choose how much importance to give to the reliability with respect to the reputation. However, RRAF shows some limitations, namely: (i) The weight to assign to the reliability versus reputation is arbitrarily set by the user, without considering the system evolution; (ii) the trust measure that an agent a perceives about an agent b is completely independent of the trust measure perceived by each other agent c, while in the reality the trust measures are mutually dependent. In this paper, we propose an extension of RRAF, aiming at facing the limitations above. In particular, we introduce a new trust reputation model, called TRR, that considers, from a mathematical viewpoint, the interdependence among all the trust measures computed in the systems. Moreover, this model dynamically computes a parameter measuring the importance of the reliability with respect to the reputation. Some experiments performed on the well‐known ART(Agent Reputation and Trust) platform show the significant advantages in terms of effectiveness introduced by TRR with respect to RRAF. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Qualitative trust model with a configurable method to aggregate ordinal data

Trust models are mechanisms that allow agents to build trust without relying on a trusted central authority. Our goal was to develop a trust model that would operate with values that humans easily understand and manipulate: qualitative and ordinal values. The result is a trust model that computes trust from experiences created in interactions and from opinions obtained from third-party agents. The trust model, termed qualitative trust model (QTM), uses qualitative and ordinal values for assessing experiences, expressing opinions and estimating trust. We treat such values appropriately; we never convert them to numbers, but merely use their relative order. To aggregate a collection of such values, we propose an aggregation method that is based on comparing distributions and show some of its properties; the method can be used in other domains and can be seen as an alternative to median and similar methods. To cope with lying agents, QTM estimates trustworthiness in opinion providers with a modified version of the weighted majority algorithm, and additionally combines trustworthiness with social links between agents; such links are obtained implicitly by observing how agents provide opinions about each other. Finally, we compare QTM against a set of well-known trust models and demonstrate that it consistently performs well and on par with other quantitative models, and in many cases even outperforms them, particularly when the number of direct experiences is low.     

Computational trust and reputation models for open multi-agent systems: a review

In open environments, agents depend on reputation and trust mechanisms to evaluate the behavior of potential partners. The scientific research in this field has considerably increased, and in fact, reputation and trust mechanisms have been already considered a key elements in the design of multi-agent systems. In this paper we provide a survey that, far from being exhaustive, intends to show the most representative models that currently exist in the literature. For this enterprise we consider several dimensions of analysis that appeared in three existing surveys, and provide new dimensions that can be complementary to the existing ones and that have not been treated directly. Moreover, besides showing the original classification that each one of the surveys provide, we also classify models that where not taken into account by the original surveys. The paper illustrates the proliferation in the past few years of models that follow a more cognitive approach, in which trust and reputation representation as mental attitudes is as important as the final values of trust and reputation. Furthermore, we provide an objective definition of trust, based on Castelfranchi’s idea that trust implies a decision to rely on someone.     

Understanding the trust of software‐intensive distributed systems

An early understanding of the trust concerns while composing a distributed system from independently developed software services saves time and effort. It also allows the developer of such distributed systems to reason about the trust‐related properties of these systems. Although there are prevalent approaches for evaluating the trust of such systems, it is not clear which approach, if any, is the most comprehensive and best suited for a given situation. Moreover, there is no agreement about a unified approach, for quantifying trust, which can be applied to the entire software life‐cycle of distributed systems. This article, first, motivates the need for such a quantification of trust via a case study from the domain of indoor tracking. It then provides a comprehensive survey of current approaches that define trust, in general domains, and then focuses on the relevant approaches from the domain of software‐oriented distributed systems. These prevalent efforts are categorized into groups using existing clustering tools and then are further analyzed for their comprehensiveness. The analysis depicts: (1) many trust‐related efforts and associated models have their own constrained views of trust; (2) different trust models focus on different aspects of trust and life‐cycle details; and (3) it is difficult to interoperate across different trust models. Hence, the paper identifies a set of principles that can assist in quantifying and evaluating the trust throughout the software life‐cycle of distributed systems. These principles, then, are applied to the aforementioned case study to provide an outline of how trustworthy distributed systems can be composed from independent software services. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

多属性动态信任关系量化模型研究

针对已有动态信任关系量化模型中由于决策属性的粗糙而导致的可信决策的谬误问题,提出了一个新的多属性动态信任关系量化模型。引入直接信任、风险、历史信任和反馈信任等多个决策属性来量化实体之间的动态信任关系,从多个角度更精细地刻画信任的复杂性和不确定性,从而使该模型具有更好的科学性和更高的实际应用价值。模拟实验表明,与已有模型相比,该可信决策的准确性和动态适应能力得到显著提高。     

Engineering trust alignment: Theory,method and experimentation

In open multi-agent systems trust models are an important tool for agents to achieve effective interactions. However, in these kinds of open systems, the agents do not necessarily use the same, or even similar, trust models, leading to semantic differences between trust evaluations in the different agents. Hence, to successfully use communicated trust evaluations, the agents need to align their trust models. We explicate that currently proposed solutions, such as common ontologies or ontology alignment methods, lead to additional problems and propose a novel approach. We show how the trust alignment can be formed by considering the interactions that agents share and describe a mathematical framework to formulate precisely how the interactions support trust evaluations for both agents. We show how this framework can be used in the alignment process and explain how an alignment should be learned. Finally, we demonstrate this alignment process in practice, using a first-order regression algorithm, to learn an alignment and test it in an example scenario.     

可信计算信任模型的模糊评估方法研究

基于可信计算中可信性影响因素,详细地讨论了基于模糊集合理论的可信计算信任模型的评估方法。把模糊逻辑推理同信任传递结合起来,采用基于相似度的加权模糊推理方法得到委托实体的可信度,评价信任模型的可信性,为可信计算信任评估提供了一种新的思路。     

Information markets over trust networks

Information markets are inefficient. Information products have large upfront development costs, yet their duplication costs are negligibly small; and they are experience goods with high costs of marketing and promotion. As a result, either winner-take-all markets are created through large and expensive promotional campaigns, or artificial monopoly power is conferred by the government through copyright protection, or both, to prevent the collapse of these markets from intense price competition and piracy. Such inefficiency creates opportunities to design more efficient markets by utilizing new technologies. Trust networks provide such an opportunity where the network infrastructure acts not only as a distribution system for information products, but also as an advertising and promotion medium, a payment and pricing mechanism, a guarantee and insurance service, and a copyright enforcement and dispute resolution tool. Such a network-centric market place is proposed to remedy many of the shortcomings of mass markets by relying on peer-to-peer distribution, peer-to-peer payments, and peer-to-peer enforcement of trust and integrity. Analytical models are presented to show that such a market place for information goods can scale up to satisfy large markets without expensive promotions and advertising campaigns, create customized products with dynamic pricing, reduce entry costs by eliminating the distinction between buyers and sellers, and eliminate the need for copyright protection.