Section Days abstract book 2010.indd - RUB Research School ...

NSE_22
A SECURE TRUST AND REPUTATION SYSTEM FOR
DECENTRALIZED APPLICATIONS
Stefan Spitz
Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Sciences
Research Group Integrated Information Systems
Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 44780 Bochum, Germany
email: stefan.spitz@rub.de
The ability to build trust relations is fundamental to human beings. Trust describes an
unidirectional feeling which exists between two members of a trust system. This feeling is on
the one hand influenced by the individual experience regarding the events during direct
interaction between the two members. On the other hand it is influenced by the reputation that
one of the two members has within the trust system.
Trust and reputation are not independent of each other due to the fact, that an opinion one
member has about another member is influenced by third parties. Both, trust and reputation
are feelings that contain a certain amount of risk and uncertainty. The challenge is to transfer
this human behaviour to a machine processable model without neglecting the factors risk and
uncertainty. Such a trust model could be used to build a decentralized trust management
system, deployable for various applications such as filesharing, sensor networks or in
distributed computing environments (grid, cloud). Furthermore, a decentralized trust system
can be easily modified for centralized applications, including, but not limiting to, online
market platforms such as eBay, Amazon or product rating and review systems such as
Epinions or Bizrate.