The effect of malicious peers in a gossip-based reputation system

Abstract

Users trust management is one of the most important issues in the Internet. In fact, due to the distributed nature of many services it is not simple to assign an objective trust value to a user, especially in the presence of groups of malicious peers. In this paper we analyze the effect of group empowering on a gossip-based reputation system named GossipTrust. In particular, we show the GossipTrust immunity to a single growing group of malicious users and to a growing number of pairs of malicious users.