International Journal of Computer Systems (ISSN: 2394-1065), Volume 03 Issue 05, May, 2016

Available at http://www.ijcsonline.com/

Gain Factor Trust - A Trust Evaluation Framework in Online Social Networks

A

Ananthy E, BPrabadevi B

A
Student, School of Information Technology and Engineering, VIT University, India
Assistant Professor School of Information Technology and Engineering, VIT University, India
A
ananthyessaky@yahoo.com, Bprabadevi.b@vit.ac.in

Abstract
In online social network (OSN), the trust evidence in the paths which is built between the immediate trustful users should
be considered to evaluate trust from one user to another user. There are some paths which may overlap with each other
leading to path dependency. A characteristic called high clustering in online social network makes the path dependency
more common. Another challenge is the decay of trust in each node while propagation. Path dependency problem and
trust decay problem is analyzed and converted in to generalized network flow problem. We propose a trust evaluation
scheme viz.,Gain Factor trust, in which we address path dependency using network flow and model decay of trust with
fixed value leakage.
Keywords: Online social network (OSN), trust evaluation, path dependency.

I.

INTRODUCTION

Trust is the most important factor in social activities.

People make friends or make deals based on the trust.
Without trust, there may be high risk in our daily activities.
Still there remains a question on how to evaluate trust in
this computerized world where there are many chances that
we have never met our friend in real life. In real world we
have some methods to evaluate trust, for example it may be
based on social distance. A may trust B strongly because B
is known to A for a long time. B introduces C to A, and A
may trust C based on the trust on B. But there is a
difference in trust. A does no trust C as much as trusting B
because the social distance is not so close. A good trust is
formed by long-time interaction and shorter distance. Trust
is a very important feature in online social network.
One of the advantages of OSN is that users can make
friends with others who may be from different country or
continent. The person may be a complete stranger. We
have to analyze that the stranger can be trusted or not
because the trust is not only a factor for relationships
between the users but also for security issues. Allowing a
stranger to view or access a users profile in OSN may also
lead to many privacy risks. Features like date of birth,
gender, location can be used for identity theft, and contact
information such as email id, messages, contact name, or
mobile number can be used for any spamming activities.
As fast as the OSN develop rapidly, the security and
privacy issues are attracting more attention.
Trust can be formed by direct contact or by any
recommendation by a known person. In a trusted path (x, p,
y), p recommends x to trust y. A path is constructed
through recommendation. So there are chances for
overlapping. In fig 1 e(x, p) and e(p, y) are two edges of a
sequential path (x, p, y); (x, p, y) and (x, q, y) are two
parallel paths; (x, p, q, y) is an overlapped path with
paths(x, p, y) and (x, q, y). Normally each edge has a
weight value between 0 (no trust) and 1 (full trust) to
quantify each direct trust.

Figure1. Trusted Graph

II.

MOTIVATION

On the web, "trust" has been an issue of security and

privacy. However, work has also focused on using the
more social aspects of trust. Each user on the site has a
single trust values which are calculated from the
perspective of designated seeds (accepted nodes). Trust
calculations are done by using a network flow model. The
metric composes certifications between members to
determine the trust level of a person. Users can be certified
at three levels: Close friends, friends, less-known. Access
to post and edit the information is controlled by these
certifications. This metric is quite attack resistant. By
identifying individual nodes that are bad and finding any
nodes that seem to be the bad nodes, the metric cuts out an
unreliable portion of the network. Calculations are based
mainly on the good nodes, so that the network as a whole
remains secure. Because of its use of groups to determine
who can post messages, it is called a group trust metric.
Current social network systems mainly focus on trust
values between one user to another, and thus their
aggregation function would need some changes to be
applied. Their paper does not completely define a specific
multiplication function for calculating trust between
individuals, but present a general framework as their main
result. However, socially, trust is not a finite resource, it is
possible to have very high trust value for a large number of
people, and that trust is not any weaker than the trust held
by a person who only trusts one or two others.

391 | International Journal of Computer Systems, ISSN-(2394-1065), Vol. 03, Issue 05, May, 2016

Ananthy E et al

III.

Gain Factor Trust - A Trust Evaluation Framework in Online Social Networks

BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK

Several trust computing mechanisms have been

proposed from various perspectives but most of them just
most of them quantify trust related factors and integrate to
a trust value by setting a weight for each factor. Trust
evaluation is formalized as classification problem and
machine learning approach can be used. It may result in
high accuracy in trust classifier. But the relationship
between the trusted social network and original social
network remains to be studied [1].
An OSN may provide a platform for attackers to
spread infections at a large scale. Insider threats give great
threat to the organization which may have been motivated
to steal vital data. Malware known as socio-ware exploits
OSN environments and makes it to perform unauthorized
and wicked activities. Socio-ware can be an executable, an
extension, an exploit code, etc., that performs malicious
activities. The problems associated with various classes of
socio-ware were addressed [2].
Pre-processing a social network can be by developing a
simple
and practical user-domain-based trusted
acquaintance chain discovery algorithm through using the
small-world network characteristics of online social
networks and taking advantage of weak bonds. Building a
trust network (BTN) and generation of a trusted graph
(GTG) with the adjustable width can be done by using
breadth-first search algorithms [3].
Degree and Contact Interval can be taken into
consideration, which produce a new trust evaluation model
(T-OSN). It is aimed to solve how --to evaluate the trust
value of an OSN user. It is not based on features of
traditional social network, such as, distance and shortest
path. Special features of OSN to build up the model, that
includes numbers of friends (Degree) and contact
frequency (Contact Interval). It makes more suitable to
evaluate OSN users trust value. The formulations of the
model are quite simple but effective which will not cost too
much resource and it is easy to implement for an OSN
website [4].
IV.

PROBLEM DEFINITION

Given a trusted graph G = (V, E),

We set the node leakage value earlier. To do so we

must know how much leakage is there in each flow. In
reality it is not easy to find it in a complex social network.
There are many factors to be considered such as distance,
strength between users. By fixing the leakage value we can
avoid the decay of trust. The leakage value can be set
flexibly. Here we do merging and splitting of nodes,
therefore we can avoid overlapping of paths which leads to
path dependency.
Algorithm
G, a trusted graph
x, source
y, destination
1. For each intermediate node q in G do
2. Split q in to q+ and q- and add an edge to it.
3. For each edge e in G do
4. If e is intermediate edge then
5. Capacity of e is 1
6. Gain factor is 1-leak(q)
7. Else
8. Capacity of e is trust value
9. Gain factor is 1.

V is the set of nodes and E is the set of edges. For two

indirectly connected nodes, x and y in V, x is the source and
y is the destination.
In this work we consider that trust value for any two
connected users is already known and it can be represented
by numerical values i.e. from 0 to 1 where 0 represents no
trust and 1 represents full trust. This is direct trusted values.
Our aim is to find trust values between any unconnected
users based on the known users. There may be leak in the
network flow where it is sent through.

V.

Figure2. Architectural Diagram

This approach avoids information reuse because the

capacity value of edges will change once it is used. The
flow will be through all edges and hence information loss is
avoided. The resulting values will obviously fall between 0
and 1 and therefore no need to normalize the values. It also
eliminates false positive effects. It is more generic.

SOLUTION

Gain Factor Trust

392 | International Journal of Computer Systems, ISSN-(2394-1065), Vol. 03, Issue 05, May, 2016

Ananthy E et al

VI.

Gain Factor Trust - A Trust Evaluation Framework in Online Social Networks

EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION

Figure4. Accepting friend requests

The user can accept the friend request by choosing the
category.

Figure3. System flow.

The phases in the experiment are as follows:
Initial phase
Establishing
communication
among users via Request
Trust score evaluation

Figure5. Posting updates with priority

The user posts updates with priority of who can see the
updates.

Setting up of Security Level

VII. CONCLUSION

A. Initial phase

As the OSN services and applications gain

popularity, the issues in trust gain more attention among
the service consumers and providers. Consumer
experience and the quality of the service can be
enhanced by improving the trust evaluation accuracy.
We make use of natural network flow to deal with path
dependency and decay of trust by fixing the node
leakage value. The process is more general saving the
normalization process.

In this pre-processing phase, all users want to register

their details in our site. It is very important to store their
data in secret. So users have some crucial and secret
information, these will be stored in unreadable format to
admin. Then login to their page. They have lot of
functionalities over there.
B. Establishing communication among users via
Request
This phase is mainly used to establish communication
among users. For that, initially the user needs to find their
friend in this site. This may be based on known member or
unknown member. We can communicate with anybody
through that request. This request will be accepted by the
opponent based on their wish. They can accept or reject.

REFERENCES
[1]

[2]

C. Trust score Evaluation

This is done based on users communication.
Communication will fall into three categories.

[3]

1. If their communication is high, the trust score will

be high and they are categorized as close friends.

[4]

2. If their conversation is normal, they are categorized

as friends.

[5]

3. If they dont have any conversation, they are

categorized as less known.

Kang Zhao; Li Pan, "A Machine Learning Based Trust Evaluation

Framework for Online Social Networks," in Trust, Security and
Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom), 2014
IEEE 13th International Conference on , 24-26 Sept. 2014.
Sood, A.K.; Zeadally, S.; Bansal, R., "Exploiting Trust: Stealthy
Attacks Through Socioware and Insider Threats," in Systems
Journal, IEEE , on ,2015.
Wenjun Jiang; Guojun Wang, "SWTrust: Generating Trusted Graph
for Trust Evaluation in Online Social Networks," in Trust, Security
and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom), 2011
IEEE 10th International Conference on , 2011.
Ming Li; Bonti, A., "T-OSN: A Trust Evaluation Model in Online
Social Networks," in Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing (EUC),
2011 IFIP 9th International Conference on , 24-26 Oct. 2011.
J. Golbeck. Computing and applying trust in webbased social
networks. PhD thesis, University of Maryland,2005.

D. Setting up of Security Level

This security level is based on those categories. Each
category has a certain limit. Based on that security level,
the comments will be posted on their wall. Some words
will store as a keyword in database. If they used that word
means it wont display. If a post is longer used means it
will stored in a trending areas.

393 | International Journal of Computer Systems, ISSN-(2394-1065), Vol. 03, Issue 05, May, 2016