A reputation and trust management broker framework for Web applications

This paper presents a distributed reputation and trust management framework that addresses the challenges of eliciting, evaluating and propagating reputation for Web applications. We propose a broker framework where every service user is associated with a broker who may represent multiple users. A broker collects for its users the distributed reputation ratings about any Web service. In return, a user provides its broker the transaction rating after every transaction with any service in order to build up the reputation database on all services. In addition, brokers form a trust network where they exchange and collect reputation data about services. By delegating trust management to brokers, individual users only need to ask their brokers about the reputation of a service before any transaction with a server. The only overhead for a user is the responsibility to share the reputation feedback with its broker. We present the distributed reputation and trust management framework and show the performance of the system by simulations.