Modeling group trust for peer-to-peer access control

The information on the Web is growing at a very fast pace. In this ever-accumulating data, the volume of information being exchanged using peer-to-peer applications is on the rise in recent times. As peer-to-peer applications like file sharing, distributed computing and instant messaging are gaining popularity, security issues related to these applications are being taken up more seriously. We focus mainly on two important security issues related to the aspect of peer-to-peer file sharing. First of these is the problem of "Peer Selection", where the notion of security deals with the identification and prevention of peers that display malicious tendencies in their behavior. The second issue is "Request Resolution" which comes into play when a peer needs to decide among the received requests for its resources. Request resolution is of vital importance since some of these requests may tend to exhaust the peer's serving capabilities (like processing capacity and bandwidth), so that it can't respond to any further requests normally. Consequences of such a maligned request may result in the peer loosing its trust among other peers as well as being branded malicious. We show how to model group trust for peer-to-peer access control so as to make them secure and thus provide a redressal to the above-mentioned issues.