Reputation Mechanism in Peer-to-Peer Network

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology has been widely used in file-sharing, distributed computing, e-market and information management. However, one of the critical challenges for P2P systems is the ability to manage risks involved in interacting and collaborating with prior unknown and potentially malicious peers. Reputation systems can successfully minimize the potential damages to the P2P systems by computing the trustworthiness of a certain peer from that peer's behavior history. In this paper, we give a brief survey of researches on reputation mechanism in P2P network. Firstly the fundamentals of reputation mechanism are introduced. By investigating the reputation systems in P2P network, we outline several key technologies of reputation mechanism. Finally we put forward the essential design principles of the ideal reputation mechanism.