Home // International Journal On Advances in Security, volume 4, numbers 3 and 4, 2011 // View article

TREMA: A Tree-based Reputation Management Solution for P2P Systems

Authors:
Quang Hieu Vu

Keywords: Peer-to-Peer; Security; Trust Evaluation; Reputation Management; Tree Structure

Abstract:
Trust is an important aspect of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems, because in such systems, peers are usually anonymous. A popular method for evaluating trust in P2P systems is to use reputation, where the reputation of a peer is determined based on its prior transactions with other peers. Since no peer has easy access to global knowledge in a decentralized system, the main challenge of this reputation-based method is how to collect and distribute reputation scores of peers efficiently. While several solutions have been proposed to address this challenge, most of them rely on a gossiping algorithm, which is costly and communication-intensive. In this paper, we propose TREMA, a tree-based reputation management solution in which we present a trust model between nodes in the tree, and explain how trust is established and maintained between pairs of nodes. We show that, compared to existing solutions, TREMA allows for scalability and efficient algorithms with low overhead. We present two possible implementations of TREMA, and explain how they could be made stable and robust to network dynamism, thus addressing the greatest weakness of a tree structure. We also analyze each implementation for its security against various adversarial scenarios, and suggest further improvements that are possible for general tree-based systems.

Pages: 163 to 172

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2011. Used with permission.

Publication date: April 30, 2012

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2636