The Difference between Trust and Reputation Management Systems

Trust and reputation management systems are two distinct procedures that work hand-in-hand to achieve intelligent networking decisions. On its own, a trust management system (TMS) cannot accurately justify network interactions. Trust is held by individual agents and trust values must be aggregated across the community in order to compute a usable metric for decision-making, i.e. reputation. Likewise, a reputation management system (RMS) cannot function properly without some treatment of an agent’s trust of other agents within a network, the role of a TMS.
For example, just because Bob may trust his friend Sam does not correlate with Sam having a good reputation. In fact, it may turn out that Sam is a malicious member of the community who has appeared trustworthy to Bob in order to take advantage of Bob’s resources. Bob could overcome such deceptive tactics by recognizing that his friends, Fred and Ben, have had negative experiences with Sam and, therefore, do not trust him. Knowing Sam’s reputation in the community, Ben may decide he no longer wants to interact with Sam. I.e. the aggregation of such trust as reputation can lead to credible depictions of agents, strengthening the intelligence of network decisions.

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