An Effective Risk Avoidance Scheme for the EigenTrust Reputation Management System

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems have attracted considerable attention in recent years, as a key technology to realize scalable, dependable network services. However, because of its high anonymity, P2P systems involve several flaws such as the weakness against malicious attacks by anonymous peers. In this paper, we propose a method to evaluate the trustfulness of each peer by explicitly taking into account the reliability of mutual evaluations. The proposed method is an improvement of the EigenTrust algorithm proposed by Kamvar et al. which calculates a global trust vector consistent with the observed local trust vectors under the weighted sum in a linear space. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by simulation. The result of simulations indicates that the proposed method identifies a large subset of reliable peers with sufficiently small number of message transmissions compared with previous schemes including the original EigenTrust.