Trustworthiness Of Users Research Articles

A group trust metric for identifying people of trust in online social networks

With the growth of social network services, the need for identifying trustworthy people has become a primary concern in order to protect users’ vast amounts of information from being misused by unreliable users. In this study, we propose the extended Advogato trust metric that facilitates the identification of trustworthy users associated with each individual user. By incorporating the strength of social relationships, we recursively diffuse a capacity of a target user throughout his/her personal network. Based on the capacity propagation, this paper also presents the capacity-first maximum flow method capable of finding the strongest path pertinent to discovering an ordered set of reliable users and preventing unreliable users from accessing personal networks. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach has advantages over existing representative methods in terms of both the discovery of reliable users and the preventability of unreliable users.

Understanding active and passive users: The effects of an active user using normal, hard and unreliable technologies on user assessment of trust in technology and co-user

The aim of this study was to understand how passive users perceive the trustworthiness of active users and technologies under varying technological conditions. An experimental study was designed to vary the functioning of technologies that active users interacted with, while passive users observed these interactions. Active and passive user ratings of technology and partner were collected. Exploratory data analysis suggests that passive users developed perceptions of technologies based on the functioning of the technology and how the active user interacted with the technology. Findings from this research have implications for the design of technologies in environments where active and passive users interact with technologies in different ways. Future work in this area should explore interventions that lead to enhanced affective engagement and trust calibration.

Trusted information exchange in peer‐to‐peer mobile social networks

SUMMARYSocial networks have recently been gaining popularity. In a peer‐to‐peer mobile social network (MSN), users with similar interests establish groups or communities and share information without relying on a centralized infrastructure. Users socially interact with each other using handheld mobile devices and membership in a group/community of MSNs is granted by a pre‐existing group member. However, it is possible that a group of malicious users can collude to promote another untrustworthy user in becoming a group member. Moreover, revoking membership without the existence of a central authority in a group is also a grant challenge. To address these problems in peer‐to‐peer MSNs, we propose a decentralized framework and the related algorithms for trusted information exchange and social interaction among users based on the dynamicity aware graph relabeling system. In contrast to the existing implementations of social networks based on a client/server paradigm, the proposed framework utilizes a lightweight trust model for identifying trustworthy users and aims at creating communities of trusted users while isolating and reducing interactions with untrustworthy users. Simulation results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed framework compared with the traditional dynamicity aware graph relabeling system algorithm.Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Sequence-based trust in collaborative filtering for document recommendation

Collaborative filtering (CF) recommender systems have emerged in various applications to support item recommendation, which solve the information-overload problem by suggesting items of interest to users. Recently, trust-based recommender systems have incorporated the trustworthiness of users into CF techniques to improve the quality of recommendation. They propose trust computation models to derive the trust values based on users' past ratings on items. A user is more trustworthy if s/he has contributed more accurate predictions than other users. Nevertheless, conventional trust-based CF methods do not address the issue of deriving the trust values based on users' various information needs on items over time. In knowledge-intensive environments, users usually have various information needs in accessing required documents over time, which forms a sequence of documents ordered according to their access time. We propose a sequence-based trust model to derive the trust values based on users' sequences of ratings on documents. The model considers two factors – time factor and document similarity – in computing the trustworthiness of users. The proposed model enhanced with the similarity of user profiles is incorporated into a standard collaborative filtering method to discover trustworthy neighbors for making predictions. The experiment result shows that the proposed model can improve the prediction accuracy of CF method in comparison with other trust-based recommender systems.

Trust and Risk based Access Control and Access Control Constraints

Access control in dynamic environments needs the ability to provide more access opportunities of information to users, while also ensuring protection information from malicious users. Trust and risk are essential factors and can be combined together in access control decision-making to meet the above requirement. In this paper, we propose the combination of the trust and risk in access control to balance information accessibility and protection. Access control decision is made on the basis of trustworthiness of users and risk value of permissions. We use potential relations between users and relations between permissions in access control. Our approach not only provides more access opportunities for trustworthy users in accessing permissions, but also enforces traditional access control constraints such as Chinese Wall policy and Separation of Duty (SoD) of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model in an effective way.

Trusted computing enhanced user authentication with OpenID and trustworthy user interface

Trusted computing, used as a security technology, can establish trust between multiple parties. One implementation of trusted computing technology standardised by the Trusted Computing Group is the trusted platform module (TPM). We build on the security provided by the TPM to create a trusted variant of identity management systems based on the popular OpenID protocol. We show that it is feasible to bind OpenID identities to the trustworthiness of the device. Our concept and implementation builds on previous work which showed that trusted computing can be used to create tickets. In this work, we use such tickets as a building block to establish trust in the OpenID protocol between the identity provider and the device. Furthermore, we investigate how mutual trust can be established in the communication between device and user during authentication. The concept of trust visualisation via a trusted environment and binding to user authentication are presented.

Elevating Prediction Accuracy n Trust-aware Collaborative Filtering Recommenders through T-index Metric and TopTrustee Lists

The growing popularity of Social Networks raises the important issue of trust. Among many systems which have realized the impact of trust, Recommender Systems have been the most influential ones. Collaborative Filtering Recommenders take advantage of trust relations between users for generating more accurate predictions. In this paper, we propose a semantic recommendation framework for creating trust relationships among all types of users with respect to different types of items, which are accessed by unique URI across heterogeneous networks and environments. We gradually build up the trust relationships between users based on the rating information from user profiles and item profiles to generate trust networks of users. For analyzing the formation of trust networks, we employ T-index as an estimate of a user’s trustworthiness to identify and select neighbors in an effective manner. In this work, we utilize T-index to form the list of an item’s raters, called Top- Trustee list for keeping the most reliable users who have already shown interest in the respective item. Thus, when a user rates an item, he/she is able to find users who can be trustworthy neighbors even though they might not be accessible within an upper bound of traversal path length. An empirical evaluation demonstrates how T-index improves the Trust Network structure by generating connections to more trustworthy users. We also show that exploiting Tindex results in better prediction accuracy and coverage of recommendations collected along few edges that connect users on a Social Network.

Spiral of hatred: social effects in Internet auctions. Between informativity and emotion

An auction platform is a dynamic environment where a rich variety of social effects can be observed. Most of those effects remain unnoticed or even hidden to ordinary users. The in-depth studies of such effects should allow us to identify and understand the key factors influencing users' behaviour. The material collected from the biggest Polish auction house has been analyzed. NLP algorithms were applied to extract sentiment-related content from collected comments and to measure informativity. Emotional distance between negative, neutral and positive comments has been calculated. The obtained results confirm the existence of the spiral-of-hatred effect but also indicate that much more complex patterns of mutual relations between sellers and buyers exist. The last section contains a several suggestions which can prove useful to improve trustworthiness of users' reports and security of an auction platform in general.

Trusting spam reporters

Spam is a growing problem; it interferes with valid email and burdens both email users and service providers. In this work, we propose a reactive spam-filtering system based on reporter reputation for use in conjunction with existing spam-filtering techniques. The system has a trust-maintenance component for users, based on their spam-reporting behavior. The challenge that we consider is that of maintaining a reliable system, not vulnerable to malicious users, that will provide early spam-campaign detection to reduce the costs incurred by users and systems. We report on the utility of a reputation system for spam filtering that makes use of the feedback of trustworthy users. We evaluate our proposed framework, using actual complaint feedback from a large population of users, and validate its spam-filtering performance on a collection of real email traffic over several weeks. To test the broader implication of the system, we create a model of the behavior of malicious reporters, and we simulate the system under various assumptions using a synthetic dataset.

Scalable reputation management with trustworthy user selection for P2P MMOGs

Recent research on Peer-to-Peer Massively Multiplayer Online Games (P2P MMOGs) has tried to find more scalable and affordable solutions to build virtual environments via the resource sharing of clients. However, P2P approaches face the problem of client misbehaviours where game rules are not processed properly, undermining a game's fairness and normal operations. In this paper, we present REPS, a distributed reputation management system for P2P MMOGs that allows trustworthy clients be identified to perform important tasks. REPS first considers the generation, storage, and query for certain reputation factors that could be the basis to evaluate user trustworthiness. We then propose Trustworthy user Selection (TuS) to adjust the weights of each factor to give preference to the more important ones. Based on the mutual rating among users and reputation queries, REPS provides a scalable and reliable mechanism to facilitate decision making, from choosing trustworthy superpeers, to deciding whether to interact with particular users.

A multimedia service composition scheme for ubiquitous networks

It is a challenging task to develop a high quality and secure multimedia service for mobile terminals used in the ubiquitous computing environment. One of the issues is the resource limitation of mobile terminals. In this paper, we presented a multimedia service composition scheme for sharing computer and communication resources by using plural terminals to compensate for this resource limitation. The proposed scheme is based on user authentication, service access control, and the multi-agent-based adaptive Quality-of-Service (QoS) control framework that we developed. We also proposed a novel access mode control based on the trustworthiness of users and extension of the multi-agent-based adaptive QoS control framework to plural users. Focusing on the home network as a typical ubiquitous network, we implemented a prototype testbed system and showed experimental results for the multimedia service composition.

Unilateral Initiatives as a Conflict Resolution Strategy

In conflict and bargaining, unilateral initiatives can produce concessions by another and can set the stage for conflict resolution. Whether such tactics are effective depends on the impressions given off. According to the theory tested here, power positions help to shape the impressions created by unilateral initiatives. On this basis, we hypothesize that (1) unilateral initiatives are more effective when parties have equal, as opposed to unequal, power relations; and (2) the size of the initiatives has different effects contingent on the relative power of user and target : Large initiatives are more effective than small ones when the user is high-power and the target is low-power, but small initiatives are more effective when the situation is reversed. We found qualified support for these hypotheses. Unilateral initiatives, as expected, created impressions of the user's trustworthiness and decreased the perceptions of the user's strength. The impression-management aspects of unilateral initiatives are more complicated than initially thought, because unilateral initiatives affected not only the impressions given off by users but also the impressions that the targets wanted to give off in response. Implications for conflict resolution are discussed.

A status report on the SEMPER framework for secure electronic commerce

The goal of the ACTS Project SEMPER (Secure Electronic Marketplace for Europe) is to provide the first open and comprehensive solution for secure commerce over the Internet and other public information networks. The basic framework described in an earlier article [M. Schunter, M. Waidner, Architecture and design of a secure electronic marketplace, Joint European Networking Conference (JENC8), Edinburgh, June 1997, pp. 712.1–712.5] has now been implemented in the Java programming language. It includes the payment systems SET, Chipper, and ecash™. The prototype uses a distinguished user-interface for trustworthy user in- and output which enables to use SEMPER on secure hardware. This article describes recent refinements to the SEMPER Framework as well as experiences gained in the field trials of the SEMPER software.