skip to main content
10.1145/3331076.3331108acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesideasConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Enabling propagation in web of trust by Ethereum

Published: 10 June 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Web of Trust offers a way to bind identities with the corresponding public keys. It relies on a distributed architecture, where each user could play the role of certificate signer. With the widespread diffusion of social networks, the trust propagation is a matter of growing interest. This paper proposes an approach enabling the propagation in Web of Trust by means of Ethereum. The usage of Ethereum eliminates the necessity of single-organization trusted services, which is, in general, not realistic. Although the information stored on Ethereum is public, the privacy of users is protected because trust chains involve only Ethereum addresses and strong measures are implemented to contrast their malicious de-anonymization. The approach relies on the usage of a smart contract for storing the status of certificate signatures and to manage revocations. When a user u wants to trust another user v, the smart contract checks the presence of trust chains originating from root nodes of u.

References

[1]
Alfarez Abdul-Rahman. 1997. The PGP Trust Model. In EDI-Forum: the Journal of Electronic Commerce, Vol. 10. 27--31.
[2]
Nikolaos Alexopoulos, Jörg Daubert, Max Mühlhäuser, and Sheikh Mahbub Habib. 2017. Beyond the hype: On using blockchains in trust management for authentication. In 2017 IEEE Trustcom/BigDataSE/ICESS. IEEE, 546--553.
[3]
Leyla Bilge, Thorsten Strufe, Davide Balzarotti, and Engin Kirda. 2009. All your contacts are belong to us: automated identity theft attacks on social networks. In Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web. ACM, 551--560.
[4]
Francesco Buccafurri, Gianluca Lax, Denis Migdal, Serena Nicolazzo, Antonino Nocera, and Christophe Rosenberger. 2017. Contrasting False Identities in Social Networks by Trust Chains and Biometric Reinforcement. In 2017 International Conference on Cyberworlds (CW). IEEE, 17--24.
[5]
Vitalik Buterin et al. 2013. Ethereum white paper. GitHub repository (2013), 22--23.
[6]
Kun-Tai Chan, Raylin Tso, Chien-Ming Chen, and Mu-En Wu. 2017. Reputation-Based Trust Evaluation Mechanism for Decentralized Environments and Its Applications Based on Smart Contracts. In Advances in Computer Science and Ubiquitous Computing. Springer, 310--314.
[7]
Mauro Conti, Radha Poovendran, and Marco Secchiero. 2012. Fakebook: Detecting fake profiles in on-line social networks. In Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2012). IEEE Computer Society, 1071--1078.
[8]
Chris Dannen. 2017. Introducing Ethereum and Solidity. Springer.
[9]
ethereumWiki. 2016. Ethereum project. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki. (2016).
[10]
ethereumWiki. 2019. Ethereum White Paper. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper. (2019).
[11]
Gianni Fenu, Lodovica Marchesi, Michele Marchesi, and Roberto Tonelli. 2018. The ICO phenomenon and its relationships with ethereum smart contract environment. In 2018 International Workshop on Blockchain Oriented Software Engineering (IWBOSE). IEEE, 26--32.
[12]
Noah E Friedkin. 1983. Horizons of observability and limits of informal control in organizations. Social Forces 62, 1 (1983), 54--77.
[13]
Simson Garfinkel. 1995. PGP: pretty good privacy. "O'Reilly Media, Inc.".
[14]
John Guare. 1990. Six degrees of separation: A play. Vintage.
[15]
Guibing Guo, Jie Zhang, and Julita Vassileva. 2011. Improving PGP web of trust through the expansion of trusted neighborhood. In Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology-Volume 01. IEEE Computer Society, 489--494.
[16]
Rolf Haenni and JacekJonczy. 2007. A New Approach to PGPâĂŹs Web of Trust. In EEMAâĂŹ07, European e-Identity Conference.
[17]
Stanley Milgram. 1967. The small world problem. Psychology today 2, 1 (1967), 60--67.
[18]
Xiu-Quan Qiao, Chun Yang, Xiao-Feng Li, and Jun-Liang Chen. 2011. A trust calculating algorithm based on social networking service users' context. Jisuanji Xuebao(Chinese Journal of Computers) 34, 12 (2011), 2403--2413.
[19]
Pavel Vasin. 2014. BlackcoinâĂŹs proof-of-stake protocol v2. URL: https://blackcoin.co/blackcoin-pos-protocol-v2-whitepaper.pdf 71 (2014).
[20]
Gavin Wood et al. 2014. Ethereum: A secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger. Ethereum project yellow paper 151 (2014), 1--32.
[21]
Cao Xiao, David Mandell Freeman, and Theodore Hwa. 2015. Detecting clusters of fake accounts in online social networks. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security. ACM, 91--101.
[22]
Alexander Yakubov, Wazen Shbair, and Radu State. 2018. BlockPGP: A Blockchain-based Framework for PGP Key Servers. In 2018 Sixth International Symposium on Computing and Networking Workshops (CANDARW). IEEE, 316--322.
[23]
Philip R Zimmermann. 1995. The official PGP user's guide. MIT press.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Combining Trust Graphs and Keystroke Dynamics to Counter Fake Identities in Social NetworksIEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing10.1109/TETC.2023.334669112:4(1066-1078)Online publication date: Oct-2024
  • (2023)A Rate-and-Trust-Based Node Selection Model for Block Transmission in Blockchain NetworksIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2022.321019710:2(1605-1616)Online publication date: 15-Jan-2023
  • (2023)A multi-layer trust framework for Self Sovereign Identity on blockchainOnline Social Networks and Media10.1016/j.osnem.2023.10026537-38(100265)Online publication date: Sep-2023
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
IDEAS '19: Proceedings of the 23rd International Database Applications & Engineering Symposium
June 2019
364 pages
ISBN:9781450362498
DOI:10.1145/3331076
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 10 June 2019

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. Ethereum
  2. blockchain
  3. pretty good privacy
  4. smart contract
  5. social network
  6. trust propagation

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

IDEAS 2019

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 74 of 210 submissions, 35%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)12
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1
Reflects downloads up to 20 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Combining Trust Graphs and Keystroke Dynamics to Counter Fake Identities in Social NetworksIEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing10.1109/TETC.2023.334669112:4(1066-1078)Online publication date: Oct-2024
  • (2023)A Rate-and-Trust-Based Node Selection Model for Block Transmission in Blockchain NetworksIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2022.321019710:2(1605-1616)Online publication date: 15-Jan-2023
  • (2023)A multi-layer trust framework for Self Sovereign Identity on blockchainOnline Social Networks and Media10.1016/j.osnem.2023.10026537-38(100265)Online publication date: Sep-2023
  • (2022)Web Mining from Interpretable Compressed Representation of Sparse Web2022 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT)10.1109/WI-IAT55865.2022.00097(620-627)Online publication date: Nov-2022
  • (2022)Social Network Analysis on Interpretable Compressed Sparse Networks2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)10.1109/ASONAM55673.2022.10068716(324-331)Online publication date: 10-Nov-2022
  • (2021)Node Selection Model for Block Transmission in a Blockchain Network2021 International Conference on Cyber-Physical Social Intelligence (ICCSI)10.1109/ICCSI53130.2021.9736212(1-5)Online publication date: 18-Dec-2021

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media