Reputation Management for DHT-Based Collaborative Environments

This article addresses a problem of integration of reputation management mechanisms and lookup processes in (distributed hash table) DHT-based peer-to-peer (P2P) networks with collaborative nature. We present a possible scenario of application of some reputation techniques to lookup and data retrieval processes in a P2P network based on the popular Kademlia algorithm. Unlike most of existing reputation management systems for DHT-based P2P environments, we don\´t use a number of successful downloads as the main instrument to evaluate a trustworthiness of peers, but we propose to consider any type of interactions between nodes. This choice is motivated by the fact that file sharing is not a unique service supported by DHT-based P2P systems. There are other application areas for P2P (e.g. collaborative and distributed computing) where it is important to consider such aspects as a risk factor, a "stay on-line" time or a number of requests without reply.