Trust transfer: encouraging self-recommendations without sybil attack

  • Authors:
  • Jean-Marc Seigneur;Alan Gray;Christian Damsgaard Jensen

  • Affiliations:
  • Trinity College Dublin, Ireland;Trinity College Dublin, Ireland;Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark

  • Venue:
  • iTrust'05 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Trust Management
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Trading privacy for trust thanks to the linkage of pseudonyms has been proposed to mitigate the inherent conflict between trust and privacy. This necessitates fusionym, that is, the calculation of a unique trust value supposed to reflect the overall trustworthiness brought by the set of linked pseudonyms. In fact, some pieces of evidence may overlap and be overcounted, leading to an incorrect trust value. In this approach, self-recommendations are possible during the privacy/trust trade. However, this means that Sybil attacks, where thousands of virtual identities belonging to the same real-world entity recommend each other, are potentially easier to carry out, as self-recommendations are an integral part of the attack. In this paper, trust transfer is used to achieve safe fusionym and protect against Sybil attacks when pieces of evidence are limited to direct observations and recommendations based on the count of event outcomes. Trust transfer implies that recommendations move some of the trustworthiness of the recommending entity to the trustworthiness of the trustee. It is demonstrated and tailored to email anti-spam settings.