A Research on the Relationship between Trust and Privacy in Network Environments

Abstract

In network environments, the entities that connect to or interact with each other may know very little about each other or without prior knowledge at the beginning of an interaction. Therefore, in many cases, before a serious interaction begins, trust must be established between the interactive entities. During trust establishment, an entity may require that the other entity provide some information that probably involves some privacy, leading to privacy loss. On the other hand, such information exchange can help establish trust for the interactive entities. Consequently, it is important to study and understand the relationship between trust and privacy. In this paper, we study the relationship between trust and privacy in network environments and propose a trust-privacy bridge with the capability of application recognition to archive the goal of protecting privacy while establishing trust. The main functions of the trust-privacy bridge include the following: (1) it can recognize the priority of protecting privacy or establishing trust for the interaction and then automatically make the interaction decision; (2) it ensures that minimum trust is granted to an interactive party in order to protect privacy; (3) it provides feedback information regarding privacy disclosure for trust evaluation. In the trust-privacy bridge, we propose a novel privacy quantification method in which we consider multiple decision factors to allow users to set their privacy preference. Simulation results show that our trust-privacy bridge can achieve trust establishment and privacy preservation goals for network interactions.