Review of threats on trust and reputation models

Purpose - As the number of available services increases on the web, it becomes greatly vital in service-oriented computing to discover a trustworthy service for a service composition so as to best-fit business requirements. However, some dishonest service providers may advertise more than what they can offer and cause a great loss to users. In the last few years, trust and reputation management over web service selection mechanism becomes an emerging way of dealing with security deficiencies which are inherent in web services environment. The purpose of this paper is to review the security threats carefully and expect that the results serve as a reference guide for designing the robust trust and reputation management mechanisms. Design/methodology/approach - Based on the published literature, the paper reviews and categorizes the most critical and important security threats that apply to trust and reputation models. Findings - A detailed review and a dedicated taxonomy table are derived. As emphasized earlier, they could serve as the most important guideline for design of trust and reputation mechanisms. Originality/value - The papers work contributes to: first, understand in details what kind of security threats may cause damage to trust and reputation management mechanisms for web services selection; and second, categorize these complex security threats and then assist in planning the defense mechanisms.