Trust Computing for Social Networking

Trust plays an important role in a Web-based social network. Given the open and dynamic nature of such an online virtual community, trust evaluation relies on transitive relationships among the direct and indirect neighbors of an evaluator. We propose a framework to evaluate the trustworthiness of a given node (e.g., a user) based on a set of trust chains and a trust graph. We will also systematically analyze the inherent relationships between the two approaches. Many terms presented in this paper are new, including a virtual trust chain, the capacity, completeness, and degree of a trust graph, and a base trust chain set for a complete trust graph. Our contributions also include algorithms outlining novel approaches for peer trust evaluation in social networks.