Trustworthiness Assessment of Users in Social Reviewing Systems

Abstract

Social Networks represent a cornerstone of our daily life, where the so-called social reviewing systems (SRSs) play a key role in our daily lives and are used to access data typically in the form of reviews. Due to their importance, social networks must be trustworthy and secure, so that their shared information can be used by the people without any concerns, and must be protected against possible attacks and misuses. One of the most critical attacks against the reputation system is represented by mendacious reviews. As this kind of attacks can be conducted by legitimate users of the network, a particularly powerful solution is to exploit trust management, by assigning a trust degree to users, so that people can weigh the gathered data based on such trust degrees. Trust management within the context of SRSs is particularly challenging, as determining incorrect behaviors is subjective and hard to be fully automatized. Several attempts in the current literature have been proposed; however, such an issue is still far from been completely resolved. In this study, we propose a solution against mendacious reviews that combines fuzzy logic and the theory of evidence by modeling trust management as a multicriteria multiexpert decision making and exploiting the novel concept of time-dependent and content-dependent crown consensus. We empirically proved that our approach outperforms the main related works approaches, also in dealing with sockpuppet attacks.