Generic Reliability Trust Model

Economic and social activity is increasingly reflected in operations on digital objects and network-mediated interactions between digital entities. Trust is a prerequisite for many of these interactions, particularly if items of value are to be exchanged. In this paper the probabilistic model and computational approaches found in some network reliability models are applied to modelling computational trust. The result is a new generalized trust model called the Generic Reliability Trust Model or GRTM and a new transitive trust metric called Hop-Count Limited Transitive Trust (HLTT). A conservative approximation heuristic is defined which leads to more practical algorithm performance. Results from a JAVA-based implementation, utilizing an XMLbased trust-graph representation and a random power-law trust graph generator, demonstrate potential for application to large ad-hoc trust networks.