Byzantine agreement for reputation management in DHT-based peer-to-peer networks

DHT-based peer-to-peer networks represent a particular environment with specific security problems. Some types of malicious activity in this kind of networks can cause the same problems as Byzantine failure in distributed computer systems. In this work we propose to integrate solutions for Byzantine Agreement (BA) used in distributed computing environment and reputation mechanisms designed for P2P networks based on DHTs, in order to obtain a simpler and efficient algorithm for reputation management. We present the complexity evaluation of the proposed solution compared to a previous reputation algorithm for DHT-based networks in terms of number of messages sent per node. The results of this evaluation show that the algorithm we present here is less ldquoexpensiverdquo in both number of messages sent and computational and memory resources involved at an adequate participation level of each network node.