MTrust-S: A multi-model based prototype system of trust management for web services

Abstract

As an important technique for internet-scale information integration, web service becomes popular very rapidly in recent years. More and more enterprises move their core business onto the Web in the form of web services. Malicious web services will affect the security and reliability of the requester's application which invokes the services. Therefore, identifying the trustworthy web services is now a critical issue to make requester's application secure and reliable. In this paper, we develop a prototype that naturally provides a solution for the evaluation and management of web service trust and reputation. The prototype integrates service requester's feedback collection, trust evaluation and trust management together. With collaborating of these three components, our prototype provides an effective way for selecting trustworthy services for the requesters. To model service trust more precisely, we present a mathematic presentation for different types of data describing service trust, i.e, discrete values, probabilistic values, brief values and fuzzy values. A series of models has been developed to evaluate the trust of services according to the types of trust values. Simulation results verify that using these models can greatly improve the success rate of invoking trustworthy services. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.