Social networks based trust is a promising approach to supporting people and software agents to interact with “strangers” on the Web. A necessary condition for trust propagation in social networks is that trust is transitive. However, is trust transitive? What types of trust are transitive and why? There are few theories and models found to answer these fundamental questions in a formal manner....

It is a common and useful task in a web of trust to evaluate the trust value between two nodes using intermediate nodes. This technique is widely used when the source node has no experience of direct interaction with the target node, or the direct trust is not reliable enough by itself. If trust is used to support decision-making, it is important to have not only an accurate estimate of trust, ...

There are a number of models for access control in ubiquitous environments that are based on trust propagation. Iterative multiplication of trust values on a path from a source entity to a target entity is one approach to trust propagation. In this paper we summarize our model for access control based on this approach. As a novel contribution, we perform experiments to determine the effectivene...

Trust propagation is the principle by which new trust relationships can be derived from pre-existing trust relationship. Trust transitivity is the most explicit form of trust propagation, meaning for example that if Alice trusts Bob, and Bob trusts Claire, then by transitivity, Alice will also trust Claire. This assumes that Bob recommends Claire to Alice. Trust fusion is also an important elem...

Non-centralized recommendation-based decision making is a central feature of several social and technological processes, such as market dynamics, peer-to-peer file-sharing and the web of trust of digital certification. We investigate the properties of trust propagation on networks, based on a simple metric of trust transitivity. We investigate analytically the percolation properties of trust tr...

A multi-community complex trust network evolution model is constructed and the fact that the minus value between the reward range and punishment range affects the trust degree of a complex trust network is made certain for the problem that the evolution of the trust weight value of the complex trust network being seldom considered. Firstly, a directed and weighted multi-community complex trust ...

Propagating trust/distrust from a set of seed (good/bad) pages to the entire Web has been widely used to combat Web spam. It has been mentioned that a combined use of good and bad seeds can lead to better results. However, little work has been known to realize this insight successfully. A serious issue of existing algorithms is that trust/distrust is propagated in non-differential ways. However...

Trust underlies effective interactions among autonomous parties. Ideally, a truster would base its trust in a trustee on the evidence of prior experiences with the trustee. But, such experiences arise between only a few trusters and trustees. Thus, a truster must rely upon the propagation of trust through a path of intermediary agents, each providing a trust assessment in the next. However, exi...

Machine to machine communications are at the center stage of the Internet of things (IoT). Connecting the physical world with the digital world not only creates new opportunities for innovation and discovery, but also opens doors for misuse and abuse. This paper argues that reputation based trust can be an effective countermeasure for securing machine-to-machine communications. We propose to es...

Web-based social networks typically use public trust systems to facilitate interactions between strangers. These systems can be corrupted by misleading information spread under the cover of anonymity, or exhibit a strong bias towards positive feedback, originating from the fear of reciprocity. Trust propagation algorithms seek to overcome these shortcomings by inferring trust ratings between st...