Encrypted certified trust in multi-agent system

We present a model for the certification of trust in multi-agent systems based on encryption. The objective is to raise the level of efficiency that client agents have when contracting specialized service agents. We make three hypotheses: (i) client agents are able to measure and inform the quality of a service they receive from a service agent; (ii) distributed certificate control is possible because every service agent stores the certificates it receives from its client agents and, (iii) the content of a certificate can be considered safe as long as the public and private keys used to encrypt the certificate remain safe. This approach reduces some weak points of trust models that rely on the direct interaction between service and client agents (direct trust) or those that rely on testimony obtained from client agents (propagated trust). Simulation showed that encrypted certificates of trust improved the efficiency of client agents when choosing their service provider agents. The reason seems to be that the reputation of a given service provider agent is based on the reputation it has among the totality of client agents that used its services.