An incentive compatible reputation mechanism for ubiquitous computing environments

Jinshan Liu (1) , Valérie Issarny (1)

1 ARLES - Software architectures and distributed systems

The vision of ubiquitous computing is becoming a reality thanks to the advent of portable devices and the advances in wireless networking technologies. It aims to facilitate user tasks through seamless utilization of services available in the surrounding environments. In such distributed environments featuring openness, interactions, especially service provision and consumption, between entities that are unknown or barely known to each other, are commonplace. Trust management through reputation mechanism to facilitate such interactions is recognized as an important element of ubiquitous computing. It is, however, faced by the problems of how to stimulate reputation information sharing and honest recommendation elicitation. We present in this paper an incentive compatible reputation mechanism to facilitate the trustworthiness evaluation in ubiquitous computing environments. It is based on probability theory and supports reputation evolution and propagation. Our reputation mechanism not only shows robustness against lies, but also stimulates honest and active recommendations. The latter is realized by ensuring that active and honest recommenders, compared to inactive or dishonest ones, can elicit the most honest (helpful) recommendations and thus suffer the least number of wrong trust decisions, as validated by simulation based evaluation.

Domaines: Informatique mobile; Informatique ubiquitaire

Jinshan Liu, Valérie Issarny. An incentive compatible reputation mechanism for ubiquitous computing environments. International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust : PST 2006, 2006, Markham, Ontario, Canada. pp.36. ⟨inria-00415118⟩