Adaptive trust management in P2P networks using gossip protocol

P2P networks are the most popular network used for data sharing and dissemination of important information. Increasing popularity of P2P networks have exposed number of problems regarding security. These problems also include the problem of finding a trustworthy peer for the dissemination of information. In this paper, a trust management scheme for unstructured P2P networks is proposed that analyzes the trustworthiness of a peer using reputation-based trust mechanism. We used gossip protocol for the dissemination of reputation or trust information. Gossip, or epidemic, protocols are the most reliable scalable and resilient network systems for the information distribution. They give us the guarantee that our information or data will be distributed across the network. We also calculated correctness and performance of each node and based on performance of each node our node selection module will select whether to communicate with that node or not. The trust-aware management scheme is capable of filtering out warnings and messages sent by untrusted or low quality peers and also capable of avoiding communication with low quality or malicious nodes.