Affiliations: School of Software Engineering and Data
Communications, Queensland University of Technology, Australia | Computer Science Department Trinity College Dublin,
Ireland | Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems, Faculty
of Computer Science, University of Stuttgart, Germany
Abstract: When transacting and interacting through open computer networks,
traditional methods used in the physical world for establishing trust can no
longer be used. Creating virtual network substitutes with which people,
organisations and software agents can derive trust in other parties requires
computerised analysis of the underlying trust networks. This article describes
an approach to trust network analysis using subjective logic (TNA-SL), that
consists of the three following elements. Firstly it uses a concise notation
with which trust transitivity and parallel combination of trust paths can be
expressed. Secondly it defines a method for simplifying complex trust networks
so that they can be expressed in this concise form. Finally it allows trust
measures to be expressed as beliefs, so that derived trust can be automatically
and securely computed with subjective logic. We compare our approach with trust
derivation algorithms that are based on normalisation such as PageRank and
EigenTrust. We also provide a numerical example to illustrates how TNA-SL can
be applied.
