A Content and Peer Reputation Method for Suppressing Harmful Content in Relay-Transfer P2P File Sharing

In P2P file sharing, problems can occur due to harmful content distributed by malicious peers and many solutions using reputation management have been proposed. However, none of these solutions are effective in relay-transfer P2P file sharing where a peer automatically relays content and creates content caches. This is because all the existing solutions only allow an evaluation of the peers without filtering harmful content in the network. We propose a reputation method for suppressing harmful content in relay-transfer P2P file sharing. In our method, we assign a reputation value to both content and peer and introduce content filtering applied at each relay. A peer who actively relays harmful content will be assigned a lower reputation value, and this can reduce the impact of harmful content and malicious peers. Simulations have shown the effectiveness of our method in terms of the diffusion of normal and harmful content.