TrustPos model: Trusting in mobile users' location

Abstract

While social games based on geo-location are gaining popularity, determining the authenticity of the players' geo-position becomes a challenge, since there are ways to counterfeit it, quite accessible to everyone. We propose a solution based on global spatial and temporal observation of the players' interactions. In this paper we present TrustPos, a trust engine model that associates a trustworthiness factor to each player based on the context of the interactions with both the game and other players. The novelty of TrustPos is the fact that our model is based on an internal network of players linked through their interactions, as opposed to previous approaches that are strongly specialized to concrete domains as peer-to-peer networks and social recommenders, not adaptable to location trust concerns. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.