Title: Mitigating malicious feedback attacks in trust management systems

Authors: Soon Keow Chong; Jemal H. Abawajy

Addresses: Parallel and Distributed Computing Lab, School of Information Technology, Deakin University, Victoria 3217, Australia ' Parallel and Distributed Computing Lab, School of Information Technology, Deakin University, Victoria 3217, Australia

Abstract: In electronic commerce (e-commerce) environment, trust management has been identified as vital component for establishing and maintaining successful relational exchanges between the trading partners. As trust management systems depend on the feedbacks provided by the trading partners, they are fallible to strategic manipulation of the rating attacks. Therefore, in order to improve the reliability of the trust management systems, an approach that addresses feedback-related vulnerabilities is paramount. This paper proposes an approach for identifying and actioning of falsified feedbacks to make trust management systems robust against rating manipulation attacks. The viability of the proposed approach is studied experimentally and the results of various simulation experiments show that the proposed approach can be highly effective in identifying falsified feedbacks.

Keywords: e-commerce; electronic commerce; feedback vulnerabilities; malicious attacks; reputation; unfair ratings; trust management; online shopping; rating attacks; falsified feedback; ratings manipulation; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJTMCC.2015.072455

International Journal of Trust Management in Computing and Communications, 2015 Vol.3 No.1, pp.1 - 18

Received: 29 Oct 2013
Accepted: 18 Dec 2013
Published online: 14 Oct 2015 *