A Reliability Model for Result Checking in Volunteer Computing

Large scale volunteer computing has been proved to be an efficient mechanism to solve the complicated problems. Specifically, in such a system, thousands of idle computers on the network are organized to finish a series of tasks dispatched by a central server. However, this computing model is vulnerable to attack from malicious peers returning incorrect results, since it is impossible to check each of thousands of the results. To address this problem, we propose a scheme to evaluate the reliability of each peer, and hence to distinguish whether the peer is honest or malicious. Specifically, the task dispatching pattern is changed so that the results returned from a peer can reflect the type of this peer. We focus on a typical dispatching pattern, and analyze its performance both theoretically and experimentally. The results indicate that the proposed scheme can effectively differentiate the malicious peers for most of the reasonable situations.