Sponsor |
Ling Liu / Li Xiong |
Area |
Systems and Databases |
Problem
The emergence of wireless and mobile networks has made possible the admission
of electronic commerce (e-commerce) to a new application and research subject:
mobile commerce (m-commerce). An
important issue in m-commerce is to support trusted computing. In an open m-commerce community, users often
have to interact with unknown or unfamiliar peers and need to manage the risks
involved with the interactions. For
example, a Palm Pilot user may download the Liberty Trojan masquerading as an
innocent program for PalmOS from other malicious
users which will wipe out all the contact information; users of mobile phones
capable of receiving simple messaging may receive SMS messages that hide
nefarious instructions. Users need to reason
about trust in order to avoid untrustworthy users and reduce risk. Techniques such as smart cards solve part of
the problem by authentication but cannot answer the question of who can be
trusted. Reputation based trust systems
address such needs by harnessing the community feedback to help users to evaluate
trustworthiness and predict future behaviors of each other.
This project is designed to survey existing research on reputation-based trust systems and other trust issues in e-commerce and in m-commerce (if any). You are expected to start with the papers listed in the references to get familiar with reputation, trust and m-commerce and then to do a literature search yourself to find related papers and uncover the research challenges in trusted m-commerce. You are encouraged to discuss whether trust in m-commerce imposes new research challenges other than those for “traditional” e-commerce; whether the trust-building techniques in e-commerce can be applied to m-commerce directly or how to adapt them if not.
References
Deliverables
Evaluation
Based on the quality of the report and the appropriateness of the list of
references turned in by the due date.