Abstract
The shifting of computation and storage towards distributed, embedded and mobile systems encompasses several advantages, as the increasing in performance, scalability, and reduction of costs. A significant drawback though is the potential lack in security and trust, due to a huge number of different, dispersed devices. In such a context, trust-based networks allow to rank nodes (e.g. devices) so that only the best are chosen to store and manipulate users personal data. However, the study of rank assessment and how a node can improve its value may become a hard task, expecially for large networks. Therefore, in this work we propose a heuristic based on statistical considerations that allows a node to achieve a good rank via a proper selection of trust links with other nodes, preserving both the effectiveness and the efficiency.