Modeling and verification of trust and reputation systems

Trust is a basic soft-security condition influencing interactive and cooperative behaviors in online communities. Several systems and models have been proposed to enforce and investigate the role of trust in the process of favoring successful cooperations while minimizing selfishness and failure. However, the analysis of their effectiveness and efficiency is a challenging issue. This paper provides a formal approach to the design and verification of trust infrastructures used in the setting of software architectures and computer networks supporting online communities. The proposed framework encompasses a process calculus of concurrent systems, a temporal logic for trust, and model checking techniques. Both functional and quantitative aspects can be modeled and analyzed, while several types of trust models can be integrated. Copyright c © John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.