A Simulation Software for the Evaluation of Vulnerabilities in Reputation Management Systems

Multi-agent distributed systems are characterized by autonomous entities that interact with each other to provide, and/or request, different kinds of services. In several contexts, especially when a reward is offered according to the quality of service, individual agents (or coordinated groups) may act in a selfish way. To prevent such behaviours, distributed Reputation Management Systems (RMSs) provide every agent with the capability of computing the reputation of the others according to direct past interactions, as well as indirect opinions reported by their neighbourhood. This last point introduces a weakness on gossiped information that makes RMSs vulnerable to malicious agents’ intent on disseminating false reputation values. Given the variety of application scenarios in which RMSs can be adopted, as well as the multitude of behaviours that agents can implement, designers need RMS evaluation tools that allow them to predict the robustness of the system to security attacks, before its actual deployment. To this aim, we present a simulation software for the vulnerability evaluation of RMSs and illustrate three case studies in which this tool was effectively used to model and assess state-of-the-art RMSs.