On securing open networks through trust and reputation – architecture, challenges and solutions

The traditional approach of providing network security has been to borrow tools from cryptography and authentication. With the Internet growing into highly decentralized and self-organizing networks, the open and anonymous nature of these networks makes them vulnerable to attacks from malicious and self-interested peers. So, we argue that the conventional view of security based on cryptography alone is not sufficient for those open networks. One way to minimize threats in such networks is to build reputation-based trust mechanisms to assess the trustworthiness of peers. But, in this research filed, there is still lack of comprehensive reputation and trust architecture, and exists a great deal of conflicting challenges. In this paper, we identify five important attributes of an elemental trust relation, provide comprehensive understanding of reputation-based trust architecture which includes three basic components, and introduce the corresponding requirements and research challenges in each component. Then we offer various reputation rating and trust inference mechanisms which can help us quantitatively model and analyze the real reputation and trust mechanisms. Finally, the novel research that considers trust and reputation systems as complex social networks is provided. The goal of this paper is to provide abundant problems to triggers more discussion on relatively new area of soft security with trust and reputation systems.