Feedback behavior and its role in trust assessment for peer-to-peer systems

One of the significant characteristics of ubiquitous environments is the need for trust management due to the vital role trust plays in the success of such environments. Recommenders constitute an important component for managing trust because they can corrupt the recommendation network by providing bogus feedback resulting in losing transactions with trustworthy nodes and committing transactions with untrustworthy nodes. Honesty checking schemes, assume that a recommender is consistent and thus does not change its recommendation behavior. In this paper, we shed light on the inconsistent recommenders’ behavior. That is, recommenders change their recommendation strategy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at linking the behavior change to honesty checking. We propose a new honesty checking algorithm and show through extensive simulation experiments its performance compared to existing honesty checking algorithms.