SECTrust: A Secure and Effective Distributed P2P Trust Model

The open, sharing and anonymous nature of peer-to-peer (P2P) network has offered opportunities and threats for the development of distributed computing technology. One feasible way to minimize threats is to establish the reputation-based global trust model. Previous work about the global trust model is almost based on the assumption that the peer with higher trust value will provide more honest feedbacks, and make the quality of feedback of a peer approximately equal to that of service of the peer. However, this is not always true. Moreover, most of the proposed global trust models take no consideration for the security of the trust management. As for these problems, this paper proposes a secure and effective feedback credibility based distributed P2P global trust model (SECTrust), and presents its corresponding security protection mechanism. Simulation experiments show that, SECTrust has advantages in combating various malicious behaviors such as ordinary malicious behaviors, and dishonest feedbacks, and suppressing the sybil attackers over the current global trust models, and demonstrates more robustness and effectiveness.