A Reputation Management Scheme Improving the Trustworthiness of P2P Networks

Because of the openness and anonymity of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, P2P participants can easily spread inauthentic resources such as viruses or worms throughout Internet. Besides, the deployment of such inauthentic resources in P2P networks has a chance of posing serious problems, thus, the trust on P2P participants needs to be carefully considered. A possible way to cope with this issue is to prevent inauthentic resources from being distributed in a way to refer peers´ reputation which reflect their past behaviors. However, a peer intentionally plays along with other peers in order to increase/decrease its reputation through false feedback exchanges. Therefore, we propose a new reputation management scheme, called TrustRM (Trustworthy Reputation Management for resource sharing), which identifies peers who give false feedback as well as provide shared resources and peers with reliability by identifying malicious peers. A case study based on NS2-simulator experiments is conducted to illustrate the application and efficiency of the TrustRM scheme. It shows that our TrustRM scheme yields efficient performance in terms of minimal download ratio of inauthentic resources, even distribution of traffic loads among peers, and efficient response to peers´ trust changes according to their false feedback exchanges.