The importance of considering unauthentic transactions in trust management systems

In peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, trust management is a key tool to minimize the impact of malicious nodes. EigenTrust is claimed to be one of the most powerful distributed reputation management systems focused on P2P file-sharing applications. It is the theoretical base of other systems, and it has also been directly modified in an attempt to improve its performance. However, none of them give appropriate importance to all the information about transactions. This paper proposes an enhancement of EigenTrust, which considers unsatisfactory transactions in greater depth. Pos&Neg EigenTrust is able to obtain a blacklist of the identities of the malicious nodes. Therefore, it is able to significantly reduce the number of unsatisfactory transactions in the network.

► We propose a powerful reputation management system for P2P file-sharing applications.
► The information about unauthentic transactions is considered in depth.
► A blacklist of the identities of the malicious nodes is obtained.
► The system reduces the number of unauthentic file downloads.