PerContRep: a practical reputation system for pervasive content services

Abstract

Social network has extended its popularity from the Internet to mobile domain. Personal mobile devices can be self-organized and communicate with each other for instant social activities at any time and in any places to achieve pervasive social networking (PSN). In such a network, various content information flows. To which extent should mobile users trust it, whilst user privacy can also be preserved? Existing work has not yet seriously considered trust and reputation management, although trust plays an important role in PSN. In this paper, we propose PerContRep, a practical reputation system for pervasive content services that can assist trustworthy content selection and consumption in a pervasive manner. We develop a hybrid trust and reputation management model to evaluate node recommendation trust and content reputation in the context of frequent change of node pseudonyms. Simulations show the advantages of PerContRep in assisting user decisions and its effectiveness with regard to unfair rating attack, collaborative unfair rating attack, on-off attack and conflict behavior attack. A prototype system achieves positive user feedback on its usability and social acceptance.