Dishonest behaviors in online rating systems: cyber competition, attack models, and attack generator

  • Authors:

  • Ya-Fei Yang;Qin-Yuan Feng;Yan Sun;Ya-Fei Dai

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI;CNDS Lab, Peking University, Beijing, China;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI;CNDS Lab, Peking University, Beijing, China

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Computer Science and Technology - Special section on trust and reputation management in future computing systmes and applications
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Recently, online rating systems are gaining popularity. Dealing with unfair ratings in such systems has been recognized as an important but challenging problem. Many unfair rating detection approaches have been developed and evaluated against simple attack models. However, the lack of unfair rating data from real human users and realistic attack behavior models has become an obstacle toward developing reliable rating systems. To solve this problem, we design and launch a rating challenge to collect unfair rating data from real human users. In order to broaden the scope of the data collection, we also develop a comprehensive signal-based unfair rating detection system. Based on the analysis of real attack data, we discover important features in unfair ratings, build attack models, and develop an unfair rating generator. The models and generator developed in this paper can be directly used to test current rating aggregation systems, as well as to assist the design of future rating systems.