WhatsTrust: A Trust Management System for WhatsApp
Name
electronics-09-02190-v3.pdf
Size
4.09 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
ca4d40d1de9da3ab9aeb581aa71397a8
Author(s)
Almuzaini, Fatimah
Alromaih, Sarah
Althnian, Alhanoof
Kurdi, Heba A.
Date Issued
December 2020
Journal
Electronics
Publisher
Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute
Citation
Almuzaini, Fatimah et al. "WhatsTrust: A Trust Management System for WhatsApp." Electronics 9, 12 (December 2020: 2190 © 2020 The Authors
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Online communication platforms face security and privacy challenges, especially in broad ecosystems, such as online social networks, where users are unfamiliar with each other. Consequently, employing trust management systems is crucial to ensuring the trustworthiness of participants, and thus, the content they share in the network. WhatsApp is one of the most popular message-based online social networks with over one billion users worldwide. Therefore, it is considered an attractive platform for cybercriminals who spread malware to gain unauthorized access to users’ accounts to steal their data or corrupt the system. None of the few trust management systems proposed in the online social network literature have considered WhatsApp as a use case. To this end, this paper introduces WhatsTrust, a trust management system for WhatsApp that evaluates the trustworthiness of users. A trust value accompanies each message to help the receiver make an informed decision regarding how to deal with the message. WhatsTrust is extensively evaluated through a strictly controlled empirical evaluation framework with two well-established trust management systems, namely EigenTrust and trust network analysis with subjective logic (TNA-SL) algorithms, as benchmarks. The experimental results demonstrate WhatsTrust’s dominance with respect to the success rate and execution time.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics9122190
