An Adaptive Spreading Activation Approach to Combating the Front-Peer Attack in Trust and Reputation System

It is argued that group-based trust metric is effective in resisting attacks, which evaluates groups of assertions "in tandem", and generally computes trust ranks for sets of individuals according to peers' social position in trust network. Thus, the group-based trust value should be called "reputation rank". But, unfortunately, most group-based trust metrics are vulnerable to the attack of front peers, which represent these malicious colluding peers always cooperate with others in order to increase their reputation, and then provide misinformation to promote actively malicious peers. In this paper, we proposed adaptive spreading activation approach to mitigating the effect of front peer attack, in which adaptive spreading factor is used to reflect the peer's recommendation ability according to behaviors of the peer's direct/indirect children in trust network; Simulation results show that the adaptive spreading activation approach can identify and mitigate the attack of front peer.