Robust and Effective Feedback Confidence Based P2P Trust Management

An important challenge regarding peer's trust valuation in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks is how to cope with such problems as dishonest feedbacks of malicious peers and attacks from strategic malicious peers, which cannot be effectively tackled by the existing solutions. So a feedback confidence (FC)-based distributed trust management model for P2P networks, named FCTM for short, is proposed to quantify and evaluate the trustworthiness of peers. In FCTM, the factor of FC is introduced to be used as the confidence metric for de-picting the extent to which the feedback peer trusts its feedbacks, which is related to three aspects, including the density of interaction experiences with the trustee, the altering scope of interaction experiences and the interacting time. Besides, we consider the feedback credibility (RC), which is constructed with the similarity function to describe the veracity of its feedbacks, and time fading characteristics of trust. Theoretical analyses and experimental results demonstrate that FCTM has advantages in combating some malicious activities over the existing models, and show more robustness and effectiveness.