Managing Trust in Social Networks

• Published in: Information security journal. Vol. 21; no. 4; pp. 206 - 215
• Main Authors: Canfora, G., Visaggio, C. A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis Group 01-01-2012
• Subjects: application security; Computer information security; trust management; Web-based social networks
• ISSN: 1939-3555; 1939-3547
• DOI: 10.1080/19393555.2012.660677

The huge diffusion of Web-based social networks increases the risks for users, including identity theft, personalized phishing, and malware. Effective mechanisms for trust evaluation can help to identify malicious users and contrast these risks.
In this paper, we propose an approach to evaluate trust based on the history of the activity of each user. This guarantees robustness (it is difficult to be artificially reproduced by an attacker) and is reliable (as it does not rely on user-generated tags or keyword but it makes an analysis of users' conversation).