Loading [MathJax]/extensions/TeX/ietmacros.js
PowerTrust: A Robust and Scalable Reputation System for Trusted Peer-to-Peer Computing | IEEE Journals & Magazine | IEEE Xplore

PowerTrust: A Robust and Scalable Reputation System for Trusted Peer-to-Peer Computing


Abstract:

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) reputation systems are essential to evaluate the trustworthiness of participating peers and to combat the selfish, dishonest, and malicious peer behavi...Show More

Abstract:

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) reputation systems are essential to evaluate the trustworthiness of participating peers and to combat the selfish, dishonest, and malicious peer behaviors. The system collects locally-generated peer feedbacks and aggregates them to yield the global reputation scores. Surprisingly, most previous work ignored the distribution of peer feedbacks. We use a trust overlay network (TON) to model the trust relationships among peers. After examining the eBay transaction trace of over 10,000 users, we discover a power-law distribution in user feedbacks. Our mathematical analysis justifies that power-law distribution is applicable to any dynamically growing P2P systems, either structured or unstructured. We develop a robust and scalable P2P reputation system, PowerTrust, to leverage the power-law feedback characteristics. The PowerTrust system dynamically selects small number of power nodes that are most reputable using a distributed ranking mechanism. By using a look-ahead random walk strategy and leveraging the power nodes, PowerTrust significantly improves in global reputation accuracy and aggregation speed. PowerTrust is adaptable to dynamics in peer joining and leaving and robust to disturbance by malicious peers. Through P2P network simulation experiments, we find significant performance gains in using PowerTrust. This power-law guided reputation system design proves to achieve high query success rate in P2P file-sharing applications. The system also reduces the total job makespan and failure rate in large-scale, parameter-sweeping P2P Grid applications.
Published in: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems ( Volume: 18, Issue: 4, April 2007)
Page(s): 460 - 473
Date of Publication: 05 March 2007

ISSN Information:


1 Introduction

In recent years, peer-to-peer (P2P) computing has gained its popularity in many large-scale distributed applications over the Internet. These include distributed file-sharing [22], digital content delivery [23], and P2P Grid computing [8]. Despite the demand of robustness and scalability of P2P systems, the anonymous and dynamic nature of peer activities make them often very vulnerable to abuses by selfish and malicious peers [11], [27]. For example, most P2P file-sharing networks, e.g., Gnutella, consist of autonomous peers with special self-interests. There is no efficient way to prevent malicious peers from joining the open networks.

References

References is not available for this document.