A simple game for the study of trust in distributed systems

摘要

Trust is an important aspect of the design and analysis of secure distributed systems. It is often used informaUy to designate those portions of a system that must function correctly in order to achieve the desired outcome. But it is a notoriously diffcult notion to formalize. What are the properties of trust? How is it learned, propagated, and utilized successfully? How can it be modeled? How can a trust model be used to derive protocols that are effcient and reliable when employed in today's expansive networks? Past work has been concerned with only a few of these issues, without concentrating on the need for a comprehensive approach to trust modeling. In this paper, we take a first step in that direction by studying an artificial community of agents that uses a notion of trust to succeed in a game against nature. The model is simple enough to analyze and simulate, but also rich enough to exhibit phenomena of real-life interactive communities. The model requires agents to make decisions. To dowell, the agents are informed by knowledge gained from their own past experience as well as from the experience of other agents. Communication among agents allows knowledge to propagate faster through the network, which in turn can allow for a more successful community. We analyze the model from both a theoretical and an experimental point of view.