PeerTrust: supporting reputation-based trust for peer-to-peer electronic communities

Peer-to-peer (P2P) online communities are commonly perceived as an environment offering both opportunities and threats. One way to minimize threats in such communities is to use community-based reputations to help estimate the trustworthiness of peers. We present PeerTrust - a reputation-based trust supporting framework, which includes a coherent adaptive trust model for quantifying and comparing the trustworthiness of peers based on a transaction-based feedback system, and a decentralized implementation of such a model over a structured P2P network. PeerTrust model has two main features. First, we introduce three basic trust parameters and two adaptive factors in computing trustworthiness of peers, namely, feedback a peer receives from other peers, the total number of transactions a peer performs, the credibility of the feedback sources, transaction context factor, and the community context factor. Second, we define a general trust metric to combine these parameters. Other contributions of the paper include strategies used for implementing the trust model in a decentralized P2P environment, evaluation mechanisms to validate the effectiveness and cost of PeerTrust model, and a set of experiments that show the feasibility and benefit of our approach.