Trust Management in Growing Decentralized Networks

Abstract In a volunteer-based self-organizing network, such as a peer-to-peer network and a wireless ad-hoc network, trustworthiness of each participant node is crucial to assure information security and resilience of the whole network. We call this kind of network a “decentralized” network. In a decentralized network, mutual evaluation of trust among nodes are considered useful to manage trustworthiness in many studies. As far as we know, all the preceding related studies discussed trust management upon stable mature networks. However, most decentralized networks in reality begin with initial states comprised of a small number of nodes, and grow gradually with new-comer nodes joining in. This paper proposes a new trust management method for a growing decentralized network. The network grows from the initial stage where we assume all the initial nodes are trustworthy enough. This paper exhibits that our method extending GossipTrust brings better performance and better quality of trust evaluation than the original GossipTrust. Keywords: Trust, Reputation, P2P networks, Ad-hoc networks, Network growth.