A Log Auditing Approach for Trust Management in Peer-to-Peer Collaboration

TL;DR

This paper presents a log auditing mechanism for trust management in peer-to-peer collaboration, aiming to detect and mitigate data privacy violations by malicious peers through trust value adjustments based on logged activities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel log auditing approach that monitors data modifications and obligations, enhancing trust management in decentralized peer-to-peer systems.

Findings

Effective detection of misbehavior through log auditing

Trust values are adjusted based on user activities

Improves privacy protection in peer-to-peer collaborations

Abstract

Nowadays we are faced with an increasing popularity of social software including wikis, blogs, micro-blogs and online social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. Unfortunately, the mostly used social services are centralized and personal information is stored at a single vendor. This results in potential privacy problems as users do not have much control over how their private data is disseminated. To overcome this limitation, some recent approaches envisioned replacing the single authority centralization of services by a peer-to-peer trust-based approach where users can decide with whom they want to share their private data. In this peer-to-peer collaboration it is very difficult to ensure that after data is shared with other peers, these peers will not misbehave and violate data privacy. In this paper we propose a mechanism that addresses the issue of data privacy violation due to data disclosure to malicious peers. In our approach trust values between users are adjusted according to their previous activities on the shared data. Users share their private data by specifying some obligations the receivers must follow. We log modifications done by users on the shared data as well as the obligations that must be followed when data is shared. By a log-auditing mechanism we detect users that misbehaved and we adjust their associated trust values by using any existing decentralized trust model.