ConTED: Towards Content Trust for the Decentralized Web

The initiatives for redecentralization of the Web such as SoLiD aim to enhance users’ privacy by enforcing transparency about the data used by Web applications. However, it is a challenge for a Web application acquiring data from third-party sources to trust data originating from many or even hidden parties. A decentralized web application requires to evaluate trust and take trust-aware decisions autonomously without relying on a centralized infrastructure. While many related trust models consider direct or reputation-based trust for making trust-aware decisions, in decentralized web applications content and context factors (called content trust) become critical due to the arbitrary number of potential data providers and the contextual nature of trust. Besides, the dynamic nature of the de-centralized web necessitates trust-aware decisions that are made autonomously by the machine in a collaborative environment without further human intervention. To address these challenges, we present ConTED, a content trust evaluation framework for enabling decentralized Web applications to evaluate content trust autonomously. We also describe the architecture concept, which makes it feasible to integrate content trust models for decentralized Web applications. To demonstrate the feasibility, ConTED is integrated with aTLAS testbed, a web-based test bed to examine trust for a redecentralized web. Finally, we evaluate ConTED in terms of scalability and accuracy through a set of experiments.