A trust model with DDoS counter mechanism for grid environment

In a grid environment, consumers get services provided by the service providers (SPs). The SPs are registered under one or more brokers and these brokers are registered under one or more regional resource administrators (RRAs) in the proposed hierarchical architecture. The consumers who are in need of services, requests the RRAs by providing their requirements. The RRA selects a suitable trustworthy SP without any biasness which normally occurs in brokers, since it doesn't gain any monetary benefits from each and every individual transaction. Consumers who are requesting for services may be genuine or malicious. In order to capture the malicious consumers who are prone to provide distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) at the RRA's site, a DDoS defeat engine comprising of authenticators is proposed. The RRA processes only the requests of the genuine consumers and not that of the DDoS consumers, thus increasing the resource utilization on genuine requests. This architecture not only provides a reduced cost-loss to consumers by selecting trustworthy SPs, but it also safeguards the trust of the SPs by accurately identifying the genuineness of the feedbacks provided by the entities (consumers and brokers) with the introduction of pre-evaluation set.