Trust Management in Online Social Networks

1  Introduction

In present world online social networks (OSN) are getting popular day by day. Different online social media like – Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Viber, Google+ etc are attracting many participant and people have been using these mediums as conducting various kinds of important activities. OSN serves different purposes including business, education, socializing and entertainment. So, privacy and trust issues are closely related with OSN. Trusting online social networks as a secured platform for conducting various kinds of activities has always been a controversial issue for the common people. So, maintaining and managing trust in the area of online social networks specially when a great number of people are engaged in the world of OSN bears importance of great value (Fu, 2007).

2  Aim of the project

People engaged in online social networks very few know who they are engaging with by the information provided by the OSNs. In fact, there is also a glitch in the system. Fake profiles  and fake information can be easily produced on OSN platform. This research will aim to focus on 

• To investigate the level of trust people are emphasizing on using OSN.
• The factors that affect in building trust model for OSN
• To discover the degree of the importance of each factor
• Comparative analysis of different social trust model for OSN and deriving a personalized multi-faceted trust model
• Making recommendations on current finding and suggesting criteria for improvement.

3  Research problems and Research questions

First online social networking website USENET was introduced in 1979, since than we have seen a substantial increase of the introducing and using OSNs in different aspects of our life (Fu & Sullivan, 2008). People’s privacy is now closely related with these OSNs. One of the main statements of the problem of this project is the absence of trust on these OSNs. Many factors are inducing these problems and either cause to increase or decrease the trust (Rababah and Alqudah, 2018).  Current trust mechanism deployed on OSNs are limited to only single authorization method. When authorization is required to identify the identity of the user it is all limited to user’s photo, contact, text or alternative email account, which can be easily hacked by the hacker.  Spam is another issue in this regard. Spam is the maltreatment electronic messaging system to send spontaneous mass messages indiscriminately (Devmane and Rana, 2013).  There are two types of spam. One is broadcast spamming and another one is context aware spamming. Broadcast spamming is not that harmful as compare to context aware spamming. Most of the users of OSN are falling into the trap of context aware spamming indeliberately. Current methodology of managing trust is not serving the security and privacy issues and therefore betraying the fundamental characteristics of trust (Fu, 2007). So, the research question will be  

• Does trust really have notable impact on users on using online social networks? If yes, then to what extent?
• What are the sources and types of OSN trust?
• Which trust model will decrease the privacy and security concerns in OSN?
• What new attributes should be added to improve the current trust models?
• Whether a customizable reputation based multi-faceted model of trust can be used in OSN?

4    Significance and benefits

The significance and benefits of this research is to provide a comparative analysis among different trust models which will help the stakeholders of different OSN to adopt the right model as per their requirement. Besides, security and privacy concerns and drawbacks of different trust models will be discussed. Moreover, this project will also discuss about the benefits of using reputation based multi-faceted trust model where cross-situational, cross-personal issues, situation specific concerns will be discussed elaborately to eradicate the leakage of information (Krauter and Bitter, 2015).

5  Methodology to be used

In order to perform this research, the following steps should be followed:

      First of all, we need to go through the collection of research papers available on different scholarly websites like ieee, research gate etc to gather information about different types of trust model which are being used in OSN and develop constructive criticism.

      Secondly, a survey will be crated in order to analyse the behaviour and perceptions of the users of OSN.

      After getting the result of the survey we have to analyse the result carefully and extract the deficiencies of different trust models.

      We will develop a prototype of reputation based multi-faceted model based on these data so that the users will get more improved performance.

      A well-documented report will be written about the overall research and findings about the development phase of this research.

6  Expected Outcomes

There are three main outcomes of this research

      An organized report that will provide comparative studies of different trust models based on security and privacy policies of OSN.

      A prototype of reputation based multifaceted trust model which will emphasize more on security issues of the users of OSN to retain their trust.

      A detailed study of types, attributes and sources of OSN trust.

However, there is also some drawbacks of this research. The survey we will conduct will not represent the big community of OSN users, so opinion may vary in different regard. Users may not give their information to us also.

7 References

• Fu, B. (2007). Trust Management in Online Social Networks. Master Degree. University of Dublin, Trinity College.
• Fu, B. and Sullivan, D. (2008). Trust management in Online Social Networks. PhD. School of Computer Science & Statistics, Trinity College, Dublin.
• Rababah, O. and Alqudah, B. (2018). Building a Trust Model for Social Network. Modern Applied Science, [online] 12(4), p.69. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5539/mas.v12n4p69 [Accessed 9 Aug. 2019].

• Devmane M.A., Rana N.K. (2013) Security Issues of Online Social Networks. In: Unnikrishnan S., Surve S., Bhoir D. (eds) Advances in Computing, Communication, and Control. ICAC3 2013. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 361. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
• Sonja Grabner-Kräuter & Sofie Bitter (2015) Trust in online social networks: A multifaceted perspective, Forum for Social Economics, 44:1, 48-68, DOI: 10.1080/07360932.2013.781517