Guest Editorial: Advances in Trust Management

Recent drastic advances on the mobile technologies and the network infrastructure have enabled kinds of new cyber spatial services to substitute for the various existing offline activities. The Social Network Services can be considered the most conspicuous one of these services and it has been propagating day by day in virtue of the expansion of the mobile internet devices. Even though this type of services is getting prevalent in our society, lack of assurance on the privacy and trust management has been highly worried among cautious users. The messages are released imminently and intuitively in these services, especially on the mobile devices, and the opinions and interactions may be imprecise or imprudent. This makes people get difficulties to give trust to the posts published on the social network services. At the beginning of the era of the mobile computing environment, it seems to be most important to achieve assurance with the management of Trust and Privacy if we desire to keep our another-society clean, transparent and reliable. This special issue focuses on recent advances and significant contributions to the Trust Management. It is composed of six papers, which are significantly extended versions of the original submissions presented at the 4th IFIP International Conference on Trust Management (IFIPTM 2010) and the 4th International Workshop on Intelligent, Mobile and Internet Services in Ubiquitous Computing (IMIS 2010). The first article [1], “A Scalable and Effective Trust-Based Framework for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks” by Jie Zhang, Chen Chen, and Robin Cohen, presents a trust-based framework for message evaluation and propagation between peers in the Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks. In the proposed framework, the trust-based evaluation model takes into account peers’ opinions collaboratively to evaluate the trustworthiness of messages and the trust-based propagation model dynamically controls information dissemination to efficiently and securely collect and propagate opinions among peers. The next paper [2], “Privacy Issues with Sharing and Computing Reputation across Communities” by Nurit Gal-Oz, Tal Grinshpoun and Ehud Gudes, sketches the privacy issues in the Cross-Community Reputation (CCR) systems, which are then sophisticatedly discussed. Also, it proposes a policy-based model which allows both the users and the communities to have control over the data propagation. In the third paper entitled “A Generic Role Based Access Control Model for Wind Power Systems” [3], Anand Nagarajan and Christian Damsgaard Jensen investigate the security challenges that may arise in the emerging energy distribution infrastructure while focusing on the IEC 61400-25 and IEC 62351 standards. Also, to complement these standards, the authors propose a generic model for access control in wind power systems, which is based on the widely used role-based access control model. The next paper entitled “Can We Use Trust in Online Dating?” by James Stanier et al. [4], surveys details of the transitive trust relationship models in the existing social networks and presents an attempt to use a decentralized trust approach to the online dating service by overlaying itself on an existing social network service. However, this paper emphasizes and proves that it is very difficult to give trust to the online dating service because human and ethical problems are involved. The fifth paper [5], “Proxies for Privacy in Ambient Systems” by Anders Kofod-Petersen and Jörg Cassens, introduces a proxy based model to minimize asymmetric flow of privacy information without quality degrades on monitoring elderly and disabled people in an ambient assisted living environment.