Optimal System Maneuver for Trust Management in Social Networks

The proliferation of Social Network Sites (SNSs) has greatly reformed the way of information dissemination, but also provided a new venue for hosts with impure motivations to disseminate malicious information. Social trust is the basis for information dissemination in SNSs. Malicious hosts judiciously and dynamically make the balance between maintaining its social trust and selfishly maximizing its malicious gain over a long time-span. Studying the optimal response strategies for each malicious host could assist to design the best system maneuver so as to achieve the targeted level of overall malicious activities. In this paper, we propose an interaction-based social trust model, and formulate the maximization of long-term malicious gains in the cases of i) single independent host, and ii) multiple competing hosts as an optimal control problem and a non-cooperative differential game, respectively. Through rigorous analysis, optimal response strategies are identified for both cases, based on which the best system maneuver mechanism is presented. Extensive numerical studies further verify the analytical results.