TrustMe: Anonymous Management of Trust Relationships in Decentralized P2P Systems

Decentralized Peer to Peer (P2P) networks offer both opportunities and threats. Its open and decentralized nature makes it extremely susceptible to malicious users spreading harmful content like viruses, trojans or, even just wasting valuable resources of the network. In order to minimize such threats, the use of community-basedreputations as trust measurements is fast becoming a de-facto standard. The idea is to dynamically assign each peer a trust rating based on its performance in the network and store it at a suitable place. Any peer wishing to interact with another peer can make an informed decision based on such a rating. An important challenge in managing such trust relationships is to design a protocol to secure the placement and access of these trust ratings. Surprisingly, all the related work in this area either support very limited anonymity or assume anonymity to be an undesired feature and neglect it. In this paper, we motivate the importance of anonymity, especially in s...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: P2P
• Authors: Aameek Singh, Ling Liu
• Keywords: P2P 2003, Peer-to-Peer Computing, Trust, Trust Querying Peer, Trust Ratings