A Trust based Access Control Framework for P2P File-Sharing Systems

Peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing systems have become popular as a new paradigm for information exchange. However, the decentralized and anonymous characteristics of P2P environments make the task of controlling access to sharing information more difficult, which cannot be done by traditional access control methods. In this paper, we identify access control requirements in such environments and propose a trust based access control framework for P2P file-sharing systems. The framework integrates aspects of trust and recommendation models, fairness based participation schemes and access control schemes, and applies them to P2P file-sharing systems. We believe that the proposed scheme is realistic and argue that our approach preserves P2P decentralized structure and peers´ autonomy property whist enabling collaboration between peers.