TSTE: A Time-variant Stochastic Trust Evaluation Model in Social Networks

Building appropriate trust evaluation models is an important research issue for security guarantee in social networks. Most of the existing works usually consider the trust values at the current time slot, and model trust as the stochastic variable. However, in fact, trust evolves over time, and trust is a stochastic process. In this paper, we propose a novel time-variant stochastic trust evaluation (TSTE) model, which models trust over time and captures trust evolution by a stochastic process. Based on the proposed model, we derive the time-variant bound of untrustworthy probability, which provides stochastic trust guarantee. On one hand, the time-variant trust level of each node can be measured by our model. Meanwhile, by tolerating nodes with relatively poor performance, our model can effectively improve the node resource utilization rate. Numerical simulations are conducted to verify the accuracy and consistency of the analytical bounds on distinguishing misbehaved nodes from normal ones. Moreover, simulation results on social network dataset show the tradeoff between trust level and resource utilization rate, and verify that the successful transmission rate can be improved by our model.