Bootstrapping Trust of Web Services through Behavior Observation

We present in this paper a new Web services trust bootstrapping technique, which consists in observing several interactions of a user with a Web service. The obtained observations sequence is modeled as a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and matched against pre-defined trust patterns in order to assess the behavior of the Web service under observation. The pre-defined trust patterns are specifications of possible behaviors of Web services. Based on the matching result, an initial trust value is assigned to the observed Web service. Our experimental results show that our technique has good precision and recall rates together with a fair distribution of trust values.