Probability-based trust management model for distributed e-commerce

The trust issue in distributed e-commerce systems has attracted much research attention in recent years. Existing e-commerce systems have presented trust management models which provide reputation information to buyers. However, more comprehensive models should be proposed to more precisely predict the trust level of sellers on potential transactions, and to defeat several kinds of possible attacks. This paper makes an effort to design PTME, a probability-based trust management model for distributed e-commerce, which is an attack-resistant trust model for evaluating and propagating reputation in distributed e-commerce systems. In this paper we describe the possible attacks on existing systems. Our model is then proposed to overcome these attacks. We provide a probability-based framework and detail approaches for this model. The performance evaluation and security analysis of PTME are provided to show its effectiveness.