Growing a Web of Trust

Web of Trust (WoT) graphs represent trust relations between people. They are used for research and analysis in various domains. Real-world instances are only available in sizes of up to 55k vertices. This renders the analysis of larger systems based on realistic input graphs impossible. To close this gap, we develop a growth model to generate WoT graphs of arbitrary size. New edges are formed based on realistic assumptions about trust establishment. We analyze the growth of a real-world WoT and perform a parameter study of our model. We compare both with many existing models and show that ours is the only one that matches the properties of the real-world WoT.