Reputation management in collaborative computing systems

In recent times, coupled with the emergence of the new cloud paradigm, a number of security related issues have emerged. Therefore, trust and reputation management has become unavoidable challenge in this new cloud computing paradigm. Cloud computing represents a shared and statistical service model that allows software, platform and infrastructure to be shared as service, with high degree of openness and autonomy. Consequently these high degree of openness and autonomy impose the need for surveillance of the services, and profer nearly an ideal condition for a spread of unauthentic files. Although peerto-peer (P2P) models and their applications are popular depending on their domain of applicability, protecting peer's security remain a challenge. As a result, this research paper presents a novel Peer-to-Peer reputationbased trust management model in a cloud provisioning environment. To validate the proposed model, a simulation environment with different peers and service provider was used in CloudAnalyst environment tool.

The 6th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Grid Computing, 2005., 2005

Reputation systems have been a hot topic in the peer-to-peer community for several years. In a services-oriented distributed computing environment like the Grid, reputation systems can be utilized by clients to select between competing service providers. In this paper, we selected several existing reputation algorithms and adapted them to the problem of service selection in a Grid-like environment. We performed a quantitative comparison of both the accuracy and overhead associated with these techniques under common scenarios. The results indicate that using a reputation system to guide service selection can significantly improve client satisfaction with minimal overhead. In addition, we show that the most appropriate algorithm depends on the kinds of anticipated attacks. A new algorithm we've proposed appears to be the approach of choice if clients can misreport service ratings.

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 2014

The popularity of the cloud computing paradigm is opening new opportunities for collaborative computing. In this paper we tackle a fundamental problem in open-ended cloud-based distributed comput- ing platforms, i.e., the quest for potential collaborators. We assume that cloud participants are willing to share their computational resources for shared distributed computing problems, but they are not willing to dis- closure

2009

Acknowledged as important factors for business environments operating as virtual organizations (VOs), trust and reputation are receiving attention also in Grids devoted to scientific applications where problems of finding suitable models and architectures for flexible security management of heterogeneous resources arise. Being these resources highly heterogeneous (from individual users to whole organizations or experiment tools and workflows), this paper presents a trust and reputation framework that integrates a number of information sources to produce a comprehensive evaluation of trust and reputation by clustering resources having similar capabilities of successfully executing a specific job. Here, trust and reputation are considered as quality of service (QoS) parameters, and are asserted on the operative context of resources, a concept expressing the resources capability of providing trusted services within collaborative scientific applications. Specifically, the framework exploits the use of distributed brokers that support interaction trust and the creation of VOs from existing scientific organizations. A broker is a distributed software module launched at some node of the Grid that makes use of resources and communicates with other brokers to perform specific reputation services. In turn, each broker contributes to maintain a dynamic and adaptive reputation assessment within the Grid in a collaborative and distributed fashion. The proposed framework is empirically implemented by adopting a SOA approach and results show its effectiveness and its possible integration in a scientific Grid.

2008 3rd International Symposium on Communications, Control and Signal Processing, 2008

Several distributed applications, implemented over today's Internet, are based on the assumption that participating agents collaborate in order to achieve their own goal. However, when these applications are modelled as unstructured distributed systems, the greater autonomy and decentralization encourage antisocial behaviours, which are likely to cause performance degradation for the whole system. This paper presents a fully distributed reputation management system that allows the evaluation of agent reputation in unstructured environments without any centralized coordination. The proposed approach is based on game theory and is capable of capturing the highly dynamic nature of the involved communities. As a representative example of an unstructured environment, Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are considered. Those dynamic communities are affected by several antisocial behaviours, such as free riding. Since this phenomenon typically causes and exacerbates an unbalanced and unfair use of system resources, it has been considered as the case study in our work. The proposed solution exploits peer reputations in order to define an incentive system, whose main goal is the dissuasion from free riding.

Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2008

The high potential of P2P infrastructures for enterprise services and applications both on the intranet (e.g. project workgroups) and on the Internet (e.g. B2B exchange) can be fully achieved provided that robust trust and security management systems are made available. This paper presents the reputation system we have devised for our P2P framework which supports secure rolebased peergroups and service interactions. Our system includes decentralized trust and security management able to cope with several threats. In the paper the underlying analytical model is presented together with a simulation-based evaluation of the robustness against malicious negative feedbacks.

Decision Support Systems, 2006

This is the author version of an article published as: Josang, Audun and Ismail, Roslan and Boyd, Colin A. (2007) A survey of trust and reputation systems for online service provision. Decision Support Systems 43(2):pp. 618-644.

Knowledge-Based Systems, 2012

In open multi-agent systems, agents engage in interactions to share and exchange information. Due to the fact that these agents are self-interested, they may jeopardize mutual trust by not performing actions as they are expected to do. To this end, different models of trust have been proposed to assess the credibility of peers in the environment. These frameworks fail to consider and analyze the multiple factors impacting the trust. In this paper, we overcome this limit by proposing a comprehensive trust framework as a multi-factor model, which applies a number of measurements to evaluate the trust of interacting agents. First, this framework considers direct interactions among agents, and this part of the framework is called online trust estimation. Furthermore, after a variable interval of time, the actual performance of the evaluated agent is compared against the information provided by some other agents (consulting agents). This comparison in the off-line process leads to both adjusting the credibility of the contributing agents in trust evaluation and improving the system trust evaluation by minimizing the estimation error. What specifically distinguishes this work from the previous proposals in the same domain is its novelty in after-interaction investigation and performance analysis that prove the applicability of the proposed model in distributed multi-agent systems. In this paper, the agent structure and interaction mechanism of the proposed framework are described. A theoretical analysis of trust assessment and the system implementation along with simulations are also discussed. Finally, a comparison of our trust framework with other well-known frameworks from the literature is provided.

Collaboration in a Data-Rich World

Online interactions between unknown parties are increasingly common. This is particularly exemplary in Virtual Organizations (VO). A VO is understood as a permanent or temporary alliance of enterprises that share their resources and skills to achieve specific business goals (collaboration opportunity). In this sense, the lack of trust between partners is seen as an hindrance to the VO's operation. Thus, reputation systems can be applied to trust establishment and management among VO's partners. Therefore, this paper presents a taxonomy to classify and compare trust and reputation systems applied to VO's context. The taxonomy is based on literature studies regarding characteristics observed through a systematic review process. In order to evaluate the proposed taxonomy, it was applied to trust and reputation systems obtained through a systematic review process. Finally, according the presented results, it is possible to note a gap concerning reputation systems applied to the context of VO and Cloud Computing integration.

LNCS Springer Verla’s Berlin , 2010

In this paper, an extended TUX-TMS: A reputation based Trust Management System is presented for enhancing reputation for enabling transaction between unknown users in grid environments. TUX-TMS evaluates trustworthiness and reputation of a domain on the basis of user feedback which is further computed using trust context factor, risk assessment, trust inheritance and trust & reputation decay. TUX-TMS is further extended by including user zones and phylogenetic tree for the users. The parameters are enhanced and redefined to secure transactions and make the information provided more trustworthy. The reputation information is also aggravated hierarchically which enables new entities to inherit domain's reputation information.