Log Auditing for Trust Assessment in Peer-to-Peer Collaboration

In order to overcome the disadvantages of a central authority, a tendency is to move towards a peer-to-peer collaboration where control over data is given to users who can decide with whom they want to share their private data. In this peer-to-peer collaboration it is very difficult to ensure that after data is shared with other peers, these peers will not misbehave and violate data privacy. In this paper, we propose a mechanism that addresses the issue of data privacy violation by auditing the collaboration logs. In our approach, trust values between users are adjusted according to their previous activities on the shared data. Users share their private data by specifying some obligations the receivers are expected to follow. We log modifications done by users as well as the obligations and use a log-auditing mechanism to detect users who misbehaved. We adjust their associated trust values by using any existing decentralized trust model.