A Robust and Efficient Trust Management Scheme for Peer-to-Peer Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scalable, robust trust management scheme for P2P networks that reduces malicious content distribution and improves search efficiency through topology adaptation, maintaining performance even with many malicious peers.

Contribution

It proposes a novel trust management approach using topology adaptation to enhance scalability, robustness, and QoS in P2P networks, outperforming existing schemes.

Findings

Trust management overhead decreases as network stabilizes

The scheme effectively reduces malicious content distribution

Maintains robustness with high percentage of malicious peers

Abstract

Studies on the large scale peer-to-peer (P2P) network like Gnutella have shown the presence of large number of free riders. Moreover, the open and decentralized nature of P2P network is exploited by malicious users who distribute unauthentic or harmful contents. Despite the existence of a number of trust management schemes in the literature for combating against free riding and distribution of malicious files, these mechanisms are not scalable due to their high computational, communication and storage overhead. These schemes also do not consider effect of trust management on quality-of-service (QoS) of the search. This paper presents a trust management scheme for P2P networks that minimizes distribution of spurious files by a novel technique called topology adaptation. It also reduces search time since most of the queries are resolved within the community of trustworthy peers. Simulation results indicate that the trust management overhead due to the pr oposed mechanism decreases considerably as the network topology stabilizes. The mechanism is also found to be robust even in presence of a large percentage of malicious peers.