Toward unified trust and reputation messaging in ubiquitous systems

Abstract

The fifth mobile generation (5G) will enable massive distributed applications that run on various platforms and cater diverse and interacting entities. If such interactions are to be successful, the entities will have to learn to trust each other and one way of addressing this is to use trust and reputation systems. These systems estimate the trustworthiness of potential interaction partners and are now being increasingly deployed. However, their inability to share information across applications is concerning: as entities traverse application boundaries their trust and reputation information does not. Instead, it is kept in silos forcing entities to remake it in every application they join. The lack of appropriate standards further impedes such sharing attempts. To address this, we propose a general framework for facilitating the exchange of trust and reputation information. The framework defines messages and a protocol that allows trust and reputation systems to query each other for ratings, provide responses, and signal errors. We analyze the proposal and provide an implementation as free software.