A General Trust Model Based on Trust Algebra

Abstract

The growing importance of Trust in the realm of open network environment introduces further research on it, due to the special significance of trust to whole system. We view trust as a relation among entities that participate in an action meeting the trustor's own standards for an intended purpose. In this paper, we propose a trust algebra aiming to solving generic trust propagation and trust inference in trust graph and present a general trust model based on trust algebra. This paper also presents a general trust inference and trust evaluation algorithm based on trust algebra and trust model. Because of the natural uncertainty of trust, we also present an information entropy to quantitatively measure trust. Our trust algebra framework is shown to be flexible enough to express other trust models and our scheme is shown to be general in different computing environments because of abstract operators of trust algebra.