Trust Management for Pervasive Social Networking

Self-organized networks based on mobile devices (e.g., Mobile Ad Hoc Networks [MANET]) are becoming a practical platform for pervasive social networking. People, either familiar or strangers, communicate with each other via such a network for instant social activities. How to help mobile users to build up trust in pervasive social networking is becoming an important and interesting issue. Trust concerns not only security, but also privacy, as well as quality of social networking experiences. It relates to many properties that are essential for establishing a trust relationship in ephemeral and dynamically changed pervasive social environments. This chapter reviews the literature with regard to how to build up trust in pervasive social networking. The authors explore whether pervasive social networking is demanded, considering many existing popular Internet social networking services. Based on a need assessment survey, they propose a trust management framework that supports context-aware trust/reputation generation, trustworthy content recommendations, secure communications, unwanted traffic control, user privacy recommendations, and secure face-to-face pervasive social communications. Simulations, prototype implementation, and user experiments further prove the effectiveness of the proposed solutions.

Trust Management for Unwanted Traffic Control

The Internet has become the backbone of remote communications, networking, and computing. It offers an incentive platform for many services and applications. People’s lives have been dramatically changed by the fast growth of the Internet. However, it also provides an easy channel for distributing contents that are unwanted by users. Unwanted traffic includes malware, viruses, spam, intrusions, unsolicited commercial advertisements, or unexpected contents. This chapter discusses applying trust management technology to automatically conduct unwanted traffic control in the Internet, especially the mobile Internet. The authors propose a generic unwanted traffic control solution through trust management. It can control unwanted traffic from its source to destinations in a personalized manner according to trust evaluation at a Global Trust Operator and traffic and behavior analysis at hosts. Thus, it can support unwanted traffic control in both a distributed and centralized manner and in both a defensive and offensive way. Simulation-based evaluation shows that the solution is effective with regard to accuracy and efficiency for Botnet intrusion and DDoS intrusion via reflectors. It is also robust against a number of malicious system attacks, such as hide evidence attack, bad mouthing attack, on-off attack, malicious attack of ISP, and combinations, which are playing in conjunction with various traffic intrusions. Meanwhile, the solution can provide personalized unwanted traffic control based on unwanted traffic detection behaviors. A prototype system is implemented to illustrate its applicability for SMS spam control.

Usable Trust Modeling and Management

Trust management has emerged as a promising technology to facilitate collaboration among entities in an environment where traditional security technologies cannot provide an effective solution. However, prior art generally lack considerations on usable means to gather and disseminate information for effective trust evaluation, as well as provide trust information to users in order to assist user decision. Current trust management solution could be hard to understand, use, and thus be accepted by the users. This chapter introduces a human-centric trust modeling and management method in order to design and develop a usable trust management solution that can be easily accepted by the users towards practical deployment. The authors illustrate how to apply this method into the design of a reputation system for mobile applications in order to demonstrate its effectiveness.

Trust Management in Mobile Cloud Computing

Cloud computing provides various computing resources delivered as a service over a network, particularly the Internet. With the rapid development of mobile networking and computing, as well as other enabling technologies, cloud computing is extended into the mobile domain. Mobile cloud computing concerns the usage of cloud computing in combination with mobile devices and mobile networks, in which trust management plays an important role to establish trust relationships in order to offer trustworthy services. This chapter briefly introduces trust management technologies in cloud computing. The authors analyze the basic requirements of trust management in mobile cloud computing by introducing its architecture and distinct characteristics. They further propose a number of schemes in order to realize autonomic data access control based on trust evaluation in a mobile cloud computing environment. Furthermore, the authors discuss unsolved issues and future research challenges in the field of trust management in mobile cloud computing.

Trust Management and Its Challenges

Trust management is the technology to collect information to make a trust decision, evaluate the criteria related to trust, monitor and reevaluate existing trust relationships, and ensure the dynamically changed trust relationships and automate the above processes. This chapter introduces trust management technologies. The authors classify them and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each. Furthermore, they discuss the current issues, problems, and future research trends in the area of trust management.

Perspective and Characteristics of Trust

Trust plays a crucial role in our social life to facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefits. With the rapid growth of digital computing and networking technologies, especially in mobile domains, trust becomes an important aspect in the design, development, and maintenance of secure computing systems and mobile systems. Trust is a complicated concept. For understanding it in a comprehensive way, this chapter introduces various perspectives of trust in different disciplines, investigates the factors that influence trust and summarizes its basic characteristics. As the first chapter, it also provides a guideline for reading the whole book.

Trust Modeling and Computational Trust

The trust model is the method to specify, evaluate, setup, and ensure trust relationships. It is the way to assist the process of trust in a digital system. This chapter introduces the technologies of trust modeling. The authors classify existing trust models based on different criteria and introduce a number of theories or technologies applied in trust evaluation. Furthermore, discussions on the current problems and challenges in the literature are presented.

Autonomic Trust Management in Mobile Environments

Autonomic trust management is the technology to automatically evaluate, establish, maintain, reevaluate, reestablish, and sustain dynamically changed trust relationships to adapt various contexts or situations. This chapter introduces an autonomic trust management solution in mobile environments by applying both trusted computing and trust evaluation technologies. The authors apply this solution to a number of mobile application scenarios in order to illustrate its applicability.

User Trust and Human-Computer Trust Interaction

Trust plays an important role in human-computer interaction. It helps people overcome risk and uncertainty during the usage of a digital computing system. With the rapid growth of computer, communication, and networking technology, human-computer trust has been paid attention to, especially for human and mobile device interaction. This chapter investigates the factors that influence the trust in human-computer interaction (i.e., the construct of Human-Computer Trust Interaction [HCTI]). Based on a literature survey, a research model of human-computer trust interaction is explored. This model contains three root constructs: interaction intention, computer system trust, and communication trust. They are further delineated into 15 sub-constructs. Based on this model, the authors propose a number of instructions to improve user trust for human-computer interaction.