RLM: A General Model for Trust Representation and Aggregation

Reputation-based trust systems provide important capability in open and service-oriented computing environments. Most existing trust models fail to assess the variance of a reputation prediction. Moreover, the summation method, widely used for reputation feedback aggregation, is vulnerable to malicious feedbacks. This paper presents a general trust model, called RLM, for a more comprehensive and robust reputation evaluation. Concretely, we define a comprehensive reputation evaluation method based on two attributes: reputation value and reputation prediction variance. The reputation predication variance serves as a quality measure of the reputation value computed based on aggregation of feedbacks. For feedback aggregation, we propose the novel Kalman aggregation method, which can inherently support robust trust evaluation. To defend against malicious and coordinated feedbacks, we design the Expectation Maximization algorithm to autonomously mitigate the influence of a malicious feedback, and further apply the hypothesis test method to resist malicious feedbacks precisely. Through theoretical analysis, we demonstrate the robustness of the RLM design against adulating and defaming attacks, two popular types of feedback attacks. Our experiments show that the RLM model can effectively capture the reputation's evolution and outperform the popular summation-based trust models in terms of both accuracy and attack resilience. Concretely, under the attack of collusive malicious feedbacks, RLM offers higher robustness for the reputation prediction and a lower false positive rate for the malicious feedback detection.