Robust Network Trust Establishment for Collaborative Applications and Protocols

We model the generation of trust relations using repeated games of incomplete information to capture the repetitive operation of the network, as well as the lack of information of each user about the others’ objectives. We find equilibria that provide solutions for the legitimate users against which the malicious users cannot improve their gains. The transitive computation of trust is modeled using semiring operators. This algebraic model allows us to generalize various trust computation algorithms. More importantly, we find the maximum distortion that a malicious user can cause to the trust computation by changing the reported trust value of a trust relation.