Sybil tolerance and probabilistic databases to compute web services trust

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015. This paper discusses how Sybil attacks can undermine trust management systems and how to respond to these attacks using advanced techniques such as credibility and probabilistic databases. In such attacks end-users have purposely different identities and hence, can provide inconsistent ratings over the same Web Services. Many existing approaches rely on arbitrary choices to filter out Sybil users and reduce their attack capabilities. However this turns out inefficient. Our approach relies on non-Sybil credible users who provide consistent ratings over Web services and hence, can be trusted. To establish these ratings and debunk Sybil users techniques such as fuzzy-clustering, graph search, and probabilistic databases are adopted. A series of experiments are carried out to demonstrate robustness of our trust approach in presence of Sybil attacks

Exploring the role of Facebook in re-shaping backpacker’s social interactions

The recent Facebook launch of Timeline, Social Graph Search, and the increased use of the mobile Facebook apps has resulted in some important implications for the use of Facebook by backpackers. The purpose of this paper is to (re) explore how Facebook has impacted social relationships between backpackers and their personal, professional, and ‘fellow traveller’ networks, particularly in-light of these recent changes to Facebook and the increased reduction of anonymity while travelling. An exploratory survey was administered to 216 backpackers through social media. Descriptive analysis was conducted to explore the perceived social risks and benefits of Facebook in the context of the backpacking experience

The effects of complexity on jurors' verdicts and construction of evidence

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