Towards Trustworthy Participants in Social Participatory Networks

By leveraging online social networks as an underlying infrastructure, Social Participatory Network (SPN) has been becoming a new paradigm of participatory sensing systems. However, a significant barrier to the widespread use of SPN applications is their vulnerability to various forms of malicious attacks. Such threats inhibit human participation and thus the viability of SPN systems in everyday use. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a trust evaluation framework for participants to encourage wider human participation in SPN. The proposal is based on the Tianjin University's own existing SPN system, named CRCS (ClassRoom Cloud System), which enables participants to use the cloud resources for online lessons or library study. It derives the trust value of participants by using entropy-weight method and data mining algorithms to deal with the behaviors data of participants. Our proposed solution can detect malicious participants easily, and more importantly, it outperforms other work for its low cost and simple deployment. For now, though our solution is based on a specified SPN system, we are confident that this solution is highly applicable to most other SPN systems.