A cloud-based trust model for evaluating quality of web services

Because trust is regarded as an essential secured relationship within a distributed network environment, selecting services over the Internet from the viewpoint of trust has been a major trend. Current research about trust model and evaluation in the context of Web services does not rationally and accurately reflect some essential characteristics of trust such as subjective uncertainty and dynamism. In this paper, we analyze some important characteristics of trust, and some key factors that affect the trust relation in the Web service environment. Accordingly, we propose a trust model based on Cloud Model theory to describe the subjective uncertainty of trust factors. A time-related backward cloud generation algorithm is given to express the dynamism of trust. Furthermore, according to the trust model and algorithm, a formalized calculation approach is provided to evaluate the trust degree of services requestors in providers. Our experiment shows that the evaluation of trust degree can effectively support trust-decisions and provide a helpful exploitation for selecting services based on the viewpoint of trust.