A Taxonomy of Trust and Reputation System Attacks

Trust and reputation have been suggested as an effective security mechanism for open and distributed environments. However, even though there exists a high number of identified attacks against Trust and Reputation Systems (TRS), a generic security framework to identify all of them in a holistic way has not yet been proposed. This work presents a TRS attack taxonomy based on an TRS architectural model and a set of well-known security topics. Based on this taxonomy, two main deficiencies of the state-of-the-art in TRS security literature are detected: the existence of TRS attacks that have received few attention from the TRS community despite its importance, and potential threats that have not been previously identified. Finally, a real-life TRS scenario is analyzed as a proof-of-concept of the proposed taxonomy.