MobiTrust: Trust Management System in Mobile Social Computing

Due to the rapid development of mobile computing technology and social network service, mobile social network emerges as a new network paradigm, which significantly facilitates the communication and resource sharing between mobile clients/users that are socially interconnected. However, the functionality and security of such networks would be potentially undermined without an effective trust management scheme. Although many trust management systems have been proposed, few of them can be applied to mobile social networks because of the unique network and communication characteristics. This paper presents a novel trust management system, termed MobileTrust, to establish secure, reliable, and accurate trust relationships between network participants. Specifically, the construction of trust models encompasses three key factors associated with the similarity of user profile, reputation, and history of friendship. A set of simulations is conducted to evaluate our system deployed in a mobile social network in the presence of dishonest users.