Robustness analysis and real world deployments

Details

Supervisor: Florian Tegeler
Duration: 3 months
Type: Bachelor Thesis or Student Project
Status: open


Hi, this project is about comparing research with the real world. In research, a lot is proposed in the world of trust and reputation systems. This is a computational representation of the trust relationships between different entities (usually computers or humans). The fundamental idea is, that one observes the behavior of other with each other and with oneself and evaluates it, to derive some information on a given entity. An example could be filesharing: if person A is offering a file and B downloads it, it can evaluate the service quality (download speed etc.) and the file itself (is it what it claimed to be?). If everything went smoothly, the probability for B to interact again with A should be increased, otherwise decreased. This concept of interaction and evaluation is usually referred to as a trust and reputation system.

We want to look whether the systems proposed in the research world are reflected in the real world. For that, you will read in into some (provided) literature and compare that to a set of real world deployments (provided as well). You will analyze the robustness of these systems against a variety of attacks and discuss possible countermeasures. This topic is very flexible and if you are interested on working with trust and reputation systems, you should definitely get in contact!