Behavior-based reputation management in P2P file-sharing networks

Trust research has become a key issue in the last few years as a novel and valid solution to ensure the security and application in peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks. The accurate measure of trust and reputation is a hard problem, most of the existing trust mechanisms adopt the historical behavior feedback to compute trust and reputation. Thus exploring the appropriate transaction behavior becomes a fundamental challenge. In P2P system, each peer plays two roles: server and client with responsibility for providing resource service and trust recommending respectively. Considering the resource service behavior and trust recommending behavior of each peer, in this paper, we propose a new trust model adopting the technology to calculate eigenvectors of trust rating and recommending matrices. In our model, we define recommended reputation value to evaluate the resource service behavior, and recommending reputation value to evaluate the trust recommendation behavior. Our algorithm would make these two reputation values established an interrelated relation of reinforcing mutually. The normal peers provide authentic file uploading services, as well as give correct trust recommendation, so they can form a trusted and cooperative transaction community via the mutual reinforcement of recommended and recommending reputation values. In this way, the transaction behaviors of those malicious peers are isolated and confined effectively. Extensive experimental results also confirm the efficiency of our trust model against the threats of exaggeration, collusion, disguise, sybil and single-behavior.

► We propose a trust model Dual-EigenRep by computing eigenvectors of trust matrices.
► Two reputation values are defined according to the different roles of each peer.
► Recommended reputation value is used to evaluate service quality for requester.
► Recommending reputation value is used to reflect the peerʼ recommending behavior.
► Our model makes normal peers form a trusted community to isolate malicious peers.