A Decentralized Behavioral Trust Framework Across Mobile Networks

2026-06-09
Pekel, Umut
Yayla, Oğuz
Mobile communication channels have become a major target for large-scale and adaptive fraud, including impersonation, phishing, and unsolicited calls. Existing caller-verification frameworks depend on centralized heuristics and static credentials that fail to reflect behavioral trust or protect users in real time. This paper presents BTID (Behavioral Trust for Identity Decentralization) - a decentralized, privacy-preserving identity framework that derives caller reputation from verified behavioral feedback. BTID integrates Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) with a lightweight zero-knowledge-proof mechanism, enabling callers to prove that their behavioral reputation meets a callee's trust threshold without revealing their actual score or personal data. Each post-call rating is recorded as a cryptographic commitment and aggregated through a pairwise Sybil-resistant reputation model governed by exponential decay (λ = 0.0039, six-month half-life). A reference prototype demonstrates that the protocol is implementable and logically sound even under high-cost and high-latency conditions on public ledgers. On modern lightweight networks such as Algorand or IOTA, the same architecture can achieve sub-second verification and near-zero cost. Beyond its technical contribution, BTID also reframes the role of the blockchain itself. Rather than treating decentralization as an ideological end, this work demonstrates that a tamper-proof and privacy-preserving public ledger can serve as a shared, universal database accessible to all participants and not as a silo controlled by industrial conglomerates. In doing so, BTID shows that the blockchain can function as a neutral trust infrastructure capable of addressing a real and universal problem in mobile communication: establishing behavioral trust without sacrificing privacy.
41st Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC 2026
Citation Formats
U. Pekel and O. Yayla, “A Decentralized Behavioral Trust Framework Across Mobile Networks,” presented at the 41st Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC 2026, Thessaloniki, Yunanistan, 2026, Accessed: 00, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=105042997224&origin=inward.