### Quantifying Trust

Mariusz Jakubowski, Ramarathnam Venkatesan, and Yacov Yacobi

##### Abstract

Trust is a central concept in public-key cryptography infrastruc- ture and in security in general. We study its initial quantification and its spread patterns. There is empirical evidence that in trust-based reputation model for virtual communities, it pays to restrict the clusters of agents to small sets with high mutual trust. We propose and motivate a mathematical model, where this phenomenon emerges naturally. In our model, we separate trust values from their weights. We motivate this separation using real examples, and show that in this model, trust converges to the extremes, agreeing with and accentuating the observed phenomenon. Specifically, in our model, cliques of agents of maximal mutual trust are formed, and the trust between any two agents that do not maximally trust each other, converges to zero. We offer initial practical relaxations to the model that preserve some of the theoretical flavor.

Available format(s)
Category
Foundations
Publication info
Published elsewhere. This paper has not been published elsewhere.
Keywords
trustcollaborationcryptography
Contact author(s)
yacov @ microsoft com
History
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2010/246

CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2010/246,
author = {Mariusz Jakubowski and Ramarathnam Venkatesan and Yacov Yacobi},
title = {Quantifying Trust},
howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2010/246},
year = {2010},
note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/246}},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/246}
}

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