FCTrust: A Robust and Efficient Feedback Credibility-Based Distributed P2P Trust Model

The open, sharing and anonymous nature of peer-to-peer (P2P) network has offered opportunities and threats. One feasible way to minimize threats is to establish the reputation-based global trust model. Previous work about the global trust model is almost based on the assumption that the peer with higher trust value will provide more honest feedbacks, and make the quality of feedback of a peer approximately equal to that of service of the peer. However, this is not always true. As for this problem, this paper proposes a robust feedback credibility (FC) based distributed P2P global trust model (FCTrust), used for quantifying and evaluating the trustworthiness of participants. Theoretical analysis and simulation experiments show that, FCTrust has advantages in combating various malicious behaviors such as dishonest feedbacks and collusions, over the current global trust models, and demonstrates more robustness and effectiveness. Moreover, we find more performance gains in convergence speed and message overhead than previous models.