SPTM: A Security Protocol for Protecting the P2P Trust Information Management

Abstract

The open, sharing and anonymous nature of peer-to-peer (P2P) network has offered opportunities and threats for the development of distributed computing technology. One feasible way to minimize threats is to establish the reputation-based trust management system (TMS). Most of previous work concentrates on how to rate peers’ behaviors with the trust mechanism and how to establish the reputation-based trust management mechanism, but takes no consideration of the security problems in trust information management. As for this issue, this paper proposes a security protocol for protecting the P2P trust information management (SPTM). Theoretical analysis and simulation experiments show that, SPTM can effectively suppress the sybil attackers and trust information tamper peers in transmissions with little time overhead. Moreover, it can be easily integrated into various reputation-based TMSs.