Reusable Defense Components for Online Reputation Systems

Attacks on trust and reputation systems (TRS) as well as defense strategies against certain attacks are the subject of many research papers. Although proposing valuable ideas, they all exhibit at least one of the following major shortcomings. Firstly, many researchers design defense mechanisms from scratch and without reusing approved ideas. Secondly, most proposals are limited to naming and theoretically describing the defense mechanisms. Another issue is the inconsistent denomination of attacks with similar characteristics among different researchers. To address these shortcomings, we propose a novel taxonomy of attacks on TRS focusing on their general characteristics and symptomatology. We use this taxonomy to assign reusable, clearly described and practically implemented components to different classes of attacks. With this work, we aim to provide a basis for TRS designers to experiment with numerous defense mechanisms and to build more robust systems in the end.