A distributed trust model for mobile computing environments

Abstract

Applying current existing trust models or trust management systems on mobile computing environments require extracting user's trust standards in different contexts, user's experience or feedback dissemination and user's decision about trust or distrust. However mobility, uncertainty and heterogeneity of mobile computing environments make trust management much more complicated, so they are inadequate in the mobile computing environments in which the clients are mobile, volatile and undetermined. In this paper, we propose a distributed trust model in a mobile computing environment based on a set of useful observations about a user behavior. The proposed trust model is particularly appealing to mobile computing environments as it is extremely light-weight, both in terms of memory requirements and computational load. The kind of way greatly avoids heavy interactions that may be required by some existing trust management solutions. The simulation experiments verify the effectiveness and benefits of our proposed model.