Research into Trust and Reputation and Risk Management

Research into Trust and Reputation
Trust has been a focal point in interpersonal relationships in many domains including Business, Sociology, and Psychology etc. Recently there has been an upsurge of interest in Trust in the Computer Science ( [ REF style change 1 Hussain et al 2004 ; Dragovic et al 2003 ; Ratnasingham 2000 ; Gupta et al 2003 ; Rahman et al ; Marsh 1994 ; Wang & Vassileva 2003 ; Singh and Liu 2003 ; Ooi et al 2003 ; Cornelli et al 2003 ; Aberer et al 2001 ; Xiong & Liu 2003 ; Chen et al 2003 and Kamv ar et al 2003 ) 2, 3, 5, 7, 10-18, 26] research community, and its applications in the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) domain. One important distinction between trust in other fields and in computer science is that the first group often involves physical environments whilst the second involves virtual environments. In physical environments, one can use various physical or facial cues or documents or referral to know such as credit agencies or government to inform the process of trust establishment [3] ( Ratnasingham 2000 ) . In virtual environments, there is an absence of physical cues, the establishment of centralized authorities such as certification authorities is still evolving for referral and may not be always applicable. Four factors have created some urgency in tackling the issues in trust and these are the advent of (i) P2P communication which could be between anonymous peers, (ii) virtual communities with the need to protect the integrity of the community, (iii) e-commerce which involves business transactions on the internet and (iv) lastly cyber-terrorism which aims at disrupting services. In this project we propose a conceptual structure and a trust model, which will be embodied in a trust management framework and trust protocol, and metrics for assigning trustworthiness values.

Research into Risk Management
Risk is present in almost every activity that is being done and carried out. Alternately, almost every activity has some undesired outcomes which a Trusting entity (Hussain et al, 2004) hopes will not occur when undertaking a particular activity. The quantification of undesired outcomes occurring can be termed as Risk. Risk is defined in its own way according to the context it is such as security, health, finance, trusted computing, business, the environment and all parts of social life. In this research, a particular attention is given to the area of electronic business and Peer-to-Peer communications, where Risk is every individual and organization's concern. In the literature, no researcher has formally defined Risk in electronic commerce, and Peer-to-Peer business. There is no methodology defined for Risk measurement, Risk prediction and Risk management methodology.