Trust assessment: a personalized, distributed, and secure approach

Currently several computer-based scenarios leverage the concept of trust as a mean to make electronic interactions (e.g., e-commerce transactions) as reliable as possible, allowing to cope with uncertainty and risks by recommending trusted peers. Generally, the evaluation of trustworthiness can be accomplished according to many principles, from social-based to psychology-based; one of the commonly adopted approaches within peer-to-peer networks, virtual social networks, and recommendation systems is the reputation-based trust evaluation. Because more and more large networks (even with millions of nodes) aim at leveraging trust, approaches to its assessment have to take into account the factors as efficient distributed implementation and effective security protection against malicious attacks.