Thesis: A framework for decentralised trust reasoning

A copy of my thesis titled "A framework for decentralised trust reasoning" is now available at http://redkeydigital.com/papers/a_abdulrahman_thesis.pdf.

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Trust in Game Theory

Discussion of trust in game theory.

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A Survey of Trust Management and Resource Discovery Technologies in Peer-to-Peer Applications



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Research Papers of Hitoshi Yamamoto

Studies/simulations on reputation systems in C2C markets.



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Preface to a conference on Trust

Lawrence Lessig on Trust.

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Small Worlds in Security Systems: an Analysis of the PGP Certificate Graph

Abstract: We propose a new approach to securing self-organized mobile ad hoc networks. In this approach, security is achieved in a fully self-organized manner; by this we mean that the
security system does not require any kind of certification authority or centralized server, even for the initialization phase. In our work, we were inspired by PGP [15] because its operation relies solely on the acquaintances between users. We show that the small-world phenomenon
naturally emerges in the PGP system as a consequence of the self-organization of users. We show this by studying the PGP certificate graph properties and by quantifying its small-world characteristics. We argue that the certificate graphs of self-organized security systems will exhibit a similar small-world phenomenon, and we provide a way to model self-organized certificate graphs. The results of the PGP certificate graph analysis and graph modelling can be used to build new self-organized security systems and to test the performance of the existing proposals. In this work, we refer to such an example.

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How To Search a Social Network

by Lada Adamic and Aytan Adar, HP Labs

This sounds like something that could inform search protocols in reputation networks.

Abstract: We address the question of how participants in a small world experiment are able to find short paths in a social network using only local information about their immediate contacts. We simulate such experiments on a network of actual email contacts within an organization. We show that strategies using information about a contact's position in physical space or in an organizational hierarchy relative to the target can effectively be used to locate most targets using the small world method but not necessarily where the network is incomplete. We compare our findings to recent theoretical hypothesis about underlying social structure that would enable these simple search strategies to succeed.

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Social Structure and Opinion Formation

by Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman, HP Labs.

Abstract: We present a dynamical theory of opinion formation that takes explicitly into account the structure of the social network in which individuals are embedded. The theory predicts the evolution of a set of opinions through the social network and establishes the existence of a martingale property, i.e. that the expected weighted fraction of the population that holds a given opinion is constant in time. Most importantly, this weighted fraction is not either zero or one, but corresponds to a non-trivial distribution of opinions in the long time limit. This coexistence of opinions within a social network is in agreement with the often observed locality effect, in which an opinion or a fad is localized to given groups without infecting the whole society. We verified these predictions, as well as those concerning the fragility of opinions and the importance of highly connected individuals in opinion formation, by performing computer experiments on a number of social networks.

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