Trust-Based Robust Mechanism in Peer-to-peer Computing

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing may trigger a revolution in the near future because of its ease of use, huge choice and low price. Its chief features are anonymous, independent, dynamic, and absent of centralized server. Due to these features, on the other hand, P2P networks are often insecure and easily suffer from the malicious attacks. Besides, the peers in the system should cooperate in order for P2P services to be effective, but self-interested peers will exist inevitably and they may attempt to maximize their consumption of system resources while minimizing the use of their own. To provide a security and reliable measure in P2P computing, this paper presents a trust-based robust mechanism. This paper shows that the reliable trust score derives from self-experiences and recommendation information. The countermeasures by trust model to some attacks such as bad mouthing attack, on-off attack, conflicting behavior attack are also studied.

1. INTRODUCTION

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are rapidly maturing to a technology that offers tremendous potential to deploy new services over the Internet. It is assumed that P2P computing may trigger a revolution in the near future because of its ease of use, huge choice and low price. A P2P network relies on computing power of its peers rather than on the network, which means the peers will do the necessary operations to keep the network going rather than a central server.