A New Trust Framework Based on Reputation for Unstructured P2P Networks

Managing trust is a key issue for a wide acceptance of P2P computing, particularly in critical areas such as e-commerce. Reputation based trust management has been identified in the literature as a viable solution to the problem. However, the mechanism faces the challenges of subjectively, experiential weighting referrals when aggregating recommendation information. Furthermore, not considering some malicious attacks when building trust relationship between peers in the existing schemes make trust model very vulnerable. This paper presents P2PTrust-a new trust framework based on reputation for unstructured P2P networks. In P2PTrust, except reputation value, reputation revision value is also taken into account in order to deal with the dynamic or spoiling behavior of peers, which makes P2PTrust differ from other trust models based on the reputation only. Considering the credibility of peers' referrals, a credibility quantification and update scheme is proposed in the paper as reliable means of seeking honest feedbacks. Subsequent experimental results show that, compared to the existing trust models, our scheme is robust in systems where the vast majority of users are malicious and more advanced in successful transaction rate.