Entropy-Based Trust Management System for Mitigating Malicious Behaviors in Trust Management Systems, Considering Information Ethics Theory

Trust management systems are used in interactive environments, where an agent needs to make a decision about using a service. Due to the preponderance of these systems, malicious entities have strong incentives to influence trust management systems and divert their decisions. In spite of approaches presented in previous trust models to mitigate the malicious activities, many of them could not cope with the problem efficiently. For example, tackling the variable behavior of agents is a common failure point for many trust models. Moreover, no rigid, flexible and adaptive general approach has been presented and the problem somehow remains.In this paper, a novel approach has been presented to prevent malicious actions and recognize anomalies using an entropy-based trust management system with capability of recognizing intrinsic characteristics of the actions, whether the action is malicious or not. the trust calculation is carried out based on an entropy structure derived from information ethics theory. Using this method, malicious actions disrupting the trust management system are filtered thus increasing the trust calculation accuracy. The experimental results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed system is promising in terms of trust calculation accuracy as well as detection of malicious behavior. specifically, the proposed model achieves a 10 percent advantage to well-known trust models in terms of speed of adaption to environmental changes and varying agent behaviors.