The Social Internet of Things (SIoT), integration of the Internet of Things
and Social Networks paradigms, has been introduced to build a network of smart
nodes that are capable of establishing social links. In order to deal with
misbehaving service provider nodes, service requestor nodes must evaluate their
trustworthiness levels. In this paper, we propose a novel trust management
mechanism in the SIoT to predict the most reliable service providers for each
service requestor, which leads to reduce the risk of being exposed to malicious
nodes. We model the SIoT with a flexible bipartite graph (containing two sets
of nodes: service providers and service requestors), then build a social
network among the service requestor nodes, using the Hellinger distance.
Afterward, we develop a social trust model using nodes' centrality and
similarity measures to extract trust behaviors among the social network nodes.
Finally, a matrix factorization technique is designed to extract latent
features of SIoT nodes, find trustworthy nodes, and mitigate the data sparsity
and cold start problems. We analyze the effect of parameters in the proposed
trust prediction mechanism on prediction accuracy. The results indicate that
feedbacks from the neighboring nodes of a specific service requestor with high
Hellinger similarity in our mechanism outperforms the best existing methods. We
also show that utilizing the social trust model, which only considers a
similarity measure, significantly improves the accuracy of the prediction
mechanism. Furthermore, we evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed trust
management system through a real-world SIoT use case. Our results demonstrate
that the proposed mechanism is resilient to different types of network attacks,
and it can accurately find the most proper and trustworthy service provider.