A Trust-Based Vulnerability Analysis in Signed Social Networks

There has been a considerable growth in interest in the modeling and analyzing of signed social networks (SSNs). However, the anonymity, dispersed, and open character of these frameworks, which stimulate users' communication capacities, and contribute to the spread of low-quality information, assaults, and manipulations from malicious users. In order to improve the robustness of a network in response to anonymity and increasing users' confidence in a social network, it is critical to analyze the vulnerability for external disturbances such as a random defense attack that targets the trust-ability of the network. In this paper, we propose an approach to capture the vulnerability of the SSNs in terms of pairwise trusts and analyze the change of balance of SSNs under various changes. To analyze the vulnerability of structural balance in SSNs, the most challenge is finding that how the energy function of a network will be changed when popular nodes, especially nodes with a high-value of trust, change their signs. We also analyze the changes of energy function using a ranking method for nodes based on trust values. As a result, by changing the value of the energy function of a network the network structure is likely intended to be unbalanced.