Trust Mass, Volume and Density - a Novel Approach to Reasoning about Trust

The notion of trust has become a major factor in today's networked world. While security is widely recognized as an important aspect of public networked systems, the actions of individual participants is often neglected. Even though the need of trust management is taken into account, there is no universal solution as to what algorithms to use for calculating trust, nor is there any universal representation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to managing trust by making an analogy between physical matter and abstract trust. We show that this alternative way of reasoning is feasible by proposing a framework based on metrics such as trust mass, volume and density, inspired by the corresponding concepts in physics. Our framework also provides for an intuitive means of representing trust graphically.