Trust Agent Research Articles

LightTrust: Lightweight Trust Management for Edge Devices in Industrial Internet of Things

The phenomenal increase in the usage of Internet promotes the quality of trust in the scope of the Internet of Things (IoT). Trust is beneficial in the provision of an effective, reliable, scalable, and trustworthy environment to users of the IoT network, where they can share their private information with each other on a secure communication platform. For successful communications among the Internet users, trust is an important factor to provide them with private infrastructures and secure environments, where exchanging data among devices becomes more easy and trustworthy. Therefore, trust management is a backbone for the successful and secure transmission of data among various nodes in a large-scale IoT network. To overcome the security issues, latency, and risk of malicious activities, a lightweight approach is proposed for those nodes in Industrial IoT that cannot maintain security. LightTrust utilizes a centralized trust agent to generate and manage trust certificates that allow nodes to communicate for a specific time without performing trust computations. Trust agents also maintain a trust database to store the current trust degree for the aggregation/propagation purposes. Trust between two nodes is developed by direct observations in terms of compatibility, cooperativeness, and delivery ratio, whereas recommendations are used to develop trust in the context of indirect observations, i.e., experience or previous knowledge. The comparative simulations of the proposed and existing approaches are also performed whereby the results illustrate that the proposed approach efficiently maintains resilience and robust environments.

FogTrust: Fog-Integrated Multi-Leveled Trust Management Mechanism for Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is widely used to reduce human dependence. It is a network of interconnected smart devices with internet connectivity that can send and receive data. However, the rapid growth of IoT devices has raised security and privacy concerns, with the identification and removal of compromised and malicious nodes being a major challenge. To overcome this, a lightweight trust management mechanism called FogTrust is proposed. It has a multi-layer architecture that includes edge nodes, a trusted agent, and a fog layer. The trust agent acts as an intermediary authority, communicating with both IoT nodes and the fog layer for computation. This reduces the burden on nodes and ensures a trustworthy environment. The trust agent calculates the trust degree and transmits it to the fog layer, which uses encryption to maintain integrity. The encrypted value is shared with the trust agent for aggregation to improve the trust degree’s accuracy. The performance of the FogTrust approach was evaluated against various potential attacks, including On-off, Good-mouthing, and Bad-mouthing. The simulation results demonstrate that it effectively assigns low trust degrees to malicious nodes in different scenarios, even with varying percentages of malicious nodes in the network.

A distributed optimization algorithm over Markov switching topology under adversarial attack

This paper investigates the distributed optimization problem with adversarial agents over Markov switching topology. A Push-DIGing type algorithm is applied to find optimizer of the distributed optimization problem. Different from most existing results on distributed optimization problems with adversary agents, we mainly focus on seeking a fixed step size algorithm under Markov switching communication graph. We first divide the agents into three sets, namely the trust agent set, the normal agent set, and the adversarial agent set. All normal agents only use the state of non-attacked agents for iterations. A practical method is presented to distinguish the adversary agents. It is shown that the states of the trust and normal agents will synchronize to the optimizer with a bounded error if (1) the step size does not exceed an upper bound, (2) the union of the communication graph has a spanning tree, and (3) the differential of a local function is decreasing. Furthermore, we also present the upper and lower bounds on distances between the converged state and the optimizer. An example is presented to verify the effectiveness of our algorithm.

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Cloud service recommendation system based on clustering trust measures in multi-cloud environment

Due to technological advancement, cloud computing is an inevitable form of computing these days and is considered a boon to mid-scale industries. As the usage of cloud computing increases day-by-day, the service deployment improves every single day, which paves the way for security threats as well. Finding trustworthy service is a highly challenging problem, which may lead to time consumption or end with inappropriate services. Due to this problem, end user needs trust based appropriate service with minimum time consumption and the service should be reliable too. Hence, a cloud service recommendation system is the current need of the cloud environment. From a pool of available cloud services, the proposed system can recommend the time conserving reliable trustworthy services. This work attempts to keep this as the goal and presents a cloud service recommendation system using clustering based trust degree computation algorithm. Trust measures are deliberating to compute the trust degree (TD) for each dynamic service, which is computed for every time and the historical information is maintained as well. Since the trust agent clustered the services in automated fashion, to isolates the most trustworthy services from all the available clustered cloud services and efficiently allocates services to the end user using trustworthy service allocation algorithm. Process of service search and recommendation needs minimum time consumption. Registering service with trust agent (TA) provides most reliable trust worthy services. The performance of this recommendation system is evaluated in terms of precision, recall, F-measure and time consumption rates. The average F-measure rate of the proposed work is computed by varying the count of users from 200 to 300 and the average F-measure rate is 91.85% with minimal time consumption than the existing approaches.

Trust based multi-agent cooperative load balancing system (TCLBS)

This paper proposes a trust based multi-agent cooperative load balancing system. The main functionalities are performed by a different agents. Load balancing agent (LBAgent), processing agent (ProcAgent), fetching agent (FetchAgent), and trust agent (TRAgent) use a centralized coordination architecture. We have implemented and tested TCLBS when there are both trusted and malicious agents. The results reveal the role of the trust agent ensures more reliable and effective service delivery depending on the behaviour of the agent. Experimental results reveal that the proposed trust computation method is apt in the presence of malicious agents to select the reliable agents to perform the tasks with load balancing.

Research on Network Privacy Protection Mechanism Based on Trust Agent in Big Data Environment

The problem of personal information and behavioral privacy disclosure in the big data environment has aroused great concern in the whole society. This paper analyzes the user privacy leakage problem in the big data environment supported by cloud computing, proposes a privacy protection mechanism based on trust agent model, and studies the specific method and implementation path of using distributed trust routing and private cloud to realize privacy protection, and its core is to prevent users from leaking real private information through the localization and virtualization of privacy data. It also discusses the problem of user privacy information being corrupted by active privacy data pollution.

Landowner and land trust agent preferences for conservation easements: Implications for sustainable land uses and landscapes

Conservation easements offer sustainable land use and environmental conservation through land use restrictions. Opportunities exist to improve the efficiency by which parties interested in conservation easement transactions are matched, which may contribute to the overall protection of agricultural landscapes. This study utilizes stated choice questions to elicit preferences for conservation easements by both landowners, as potential easement suppliers, and land trust professionals as potential easement demanders. A random utility model is estimated for landowners and for land trust professionals. Results indicate both preference overlap and preference divergence between these two sets of respondents. Significant opportunities exist to reduce search and transactions costs, improve easement acceptance, and increase environmental protection via increased transaction frequency of conservation easements in this emerging market. When negotiating with landowners, land trusts need to be aware of concerns related to issues such as managerial control, public access, lack of trust, and financial compensation. Moreover, heterogeneity amongst participants regarding these issues suggests some agricultural landowners may be more or less concerned about these issues.

Ad-hoc Network Secured via Trust Computing

Ad hoc network consist of a collection of wireless nodes, all of which may be mobile, dynamically creates a wireless network topology amongst them without using any fixed infrastructure. Nodes communicate with each other by passing data and control packet from one node to another. The execution and survival of an Ad-hoc network is rely upon the co-operative and trusting nature of its nodes. Ad-hoc network are vulnerable to passive and active attacks by malicious nodes due to the independent movement of nodes. Several protocols have been developed to secure Ad-hoc networks using cryptographic schemes, but all dependent on the existence of central trust authority. The presence of central trust authority is an impractical requirement for Ad-hoc networks, so in this Paper we present a trust model that doesn’t rely on central trust authority. In our model we make use of trust agents that reside on network nodes. Each agent operates independently and maintains its individual trust value. An agent gathers data from all events & assigns weights to each event and computes different trust levels based upon them. Each trust agent basically performs the three functions: Trust Derivation, Quantification, and Computation.

Autonomy Domain Trust Model in Manufacturing Grid Based on User Trust Agent

Trust security is one of the hotspot in manufacturing grid. The paper proposes a trust model to suit for manufacturing grid, based on domain trust model. It manages trust value of grid user from the introducing of user trust agent in autonomy domain. Furthermore, it considers the impact of time decay and the punishment of malicious transactions. The model is effective in reducing the malicious transaction of grid user to improve security of manufacturing grid through analysis and experiment simulation. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/telkomnika.v11i11.3493 Full Text: PDF

Towards a corporate governance trust agent scoring model for collaborative virtual organisations

In this 'visionary' paper, we describe how a semiotic ladder, together with a supportive trust agent, can be used to address 'soft' trust issues in the context of collaborative Virtual Organisations (VOs). The intention is to offer all parties better support for trust (as reputation) management, including the reduction of risk and improved reliability of VO e-services. The semiotic ladder is intended to support the VO e-service life cycle through the articulation of e-trust at various levels of system abstraction, including trust as a measurable confidence level. A novel trust agent is used to provide the consumer with an objective measure of the trustworthiness of the e-service at runtime, just prior to its actual consumption. Specifically, VO consumer confidence level is informed via a set of Corporate Governance (CG) scores, which are used as a trust proxy for the 'real' owner of the VO.

Virtual Organisational Trust Requirements

It is suggested that the use of the semiotic ladder, together with a supportive trust agent can be used together to better explicate “soft” trust issues in the context of Grid services. The contribution offered here is intended to fill a gap in current understanding and modelling of such issues and to support Grid service designers to better conceptualise, hence manage trust issues. The semiotic paradigm is intended to offer an integrative viewpoint within which to explicate “soft” trust issues throughout the Grid life-cycle. A computationally lightweight trust agent is described that can be used to verify high level trust of a Virtual Organisation. The potential benefits of the approach that is advocated here include the reduction of risk and potential improvements in the quality and reliability of Grid service partnerships. For these benefits to accrue, explicit “soft” as well as “hard” trust management is essential as is an integrative viewpoint.