A trusted infrastructure for P2P-based marketplaces

Peer-to-peer (P2P) based marketplaces have a number of advantages over traditional centralized systems (such as eBay). Peers form a distributed hash table and store sale offers for other peers. A key problem in such a system is ensuring that the peers store and report all sale offers fairly, and do not for instance favor their own offers. We give a solution to this problem based on trusted computing, but unlike other approaches we do not measure and restrict all firmware and software running on a peer. Instead, we tie offers to monotonic counters in such a way that any attempt to not report an offer, or report it falsely, will be detected.

1 Introduction

P2P-based marketplaces offer a number of advantages over centralized systems. First, they scales better and has no single point of failure, thanks to the P2P infrastructure. Second, there would be no limitation on the types of items being exchanged in the market. In other words, the P2P infrastructure overcomes censorship problems found in centralized systems. Third, no single point of authority means a monopoly cannot arise.