On trust confusional, trust ignorant, and trust transitions

Abstract

This paper introduces a two-dimensional representation for trust values that uses two metrics: “trust” and “distrust.” With this representation, we can deal with such contradictory arguments as “The message is basically trustworthy but simultaneously not trustworthy.” Such situations can be caused when a message is consistent with other messages, but the message is sent from an unknown sender. We also explore how to analyze the transitions of two-dimensional trust values with a theory of distributed algorithms and compare our trust representation with Jøsang’s subjective logic.