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.