International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

CryptoDB

Quantifying Trust

Authors:
Mariusz Jakubowski
Ramarathnam Venkatesan
Yacov Yacobi
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URL: http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/246
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Abstract: Trust is a central concept in public-key cryptography infrastruc- ture and in security in general. We study its initial quantification and its spread patterns. There is empirical evidence that in trust-based reputation model for virtual communities, it pays to restrict the clusters of agents to small sets with high mutual trust. We propose and motivate a mathematical model, where this phenomenon emerges naturally. In our model, we separate trust values from their weights. We motivate this separation using real examples, and show that in this model, trust converges to the extremes, agreeing with and accentuating the observed phenomenon. Specifically, in our model, cliques of agents of maximal mutual trust are formed, and the trust between any two agents that do not maximally trust each other, converges to zero. We offer initial practical relaxations to the model that preserve some of the theoretical flavor.
BibTeX
@misc{eprint-2010-23147,
  title={Quantifying Trust},
  booktitle={IACR Eprint archive},
  keywords={foundations / trust, collaboration,  cryptography},
  url={http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/246},
  note={This paper has not been published elsewhere. yacov@microsoft.com 14728 received 29 Apr 2010},
  author={Mariusz Jakubowski and Ramarathnam Venkatesan and Yacov Yacobi},
  year=2010
}