A Computational Dynamic Trust Model for User Authorization

Development of authorization mechanisms for secure information access by a large community of users in an open environment is an important problem in the ever-growing Internet world. In this paper we propose a computational dynamic trust model for user authorization, rooted in findings from social science. Unlike most existing computational trust models, this model distinguishes trusting belief in integrity from that in competence in different contexts and accounts for subjectivity in the evaluation of a particular trustee by different trusters. Simulation studies were conducted to compare the performance of the proposed integrity belief model with other trust models from the literature for different user behavior patterns. Experiments show that the proposed model achieves higher performance than other models especially in predicting the behavior of unstable users.