Incorporating trust in the BitTorrent protocol

Decentralized Peer to Peer (P2P) networks offer both opportunities and threats. Its open and decentralized nature makes it extremely susceptible to malicious users spreading harmful content like viruses, trojans or, even just wasting valuable resources of the network. In order to minimize such threats, the use of community-based reputations as trust measurements is fast becoming a de-facto standard. The idea is to dynamically assign each peer a trust rating based on its performance in the network and store it at a suitable place. Any peer wishing to interact with another peer can make an informed decision based on such a rating.

Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Information Security Applications (WISA 2010), Paper ID: 53, August 2010, Jeju Island, South Korea., 2010

Studies on the large scale peer-to-peer (P2P) network like Gnutella have shown the presence of large number of free riders. Moreover, the open and decentralized nature of P2P network is exploited by malicious users who distribute unauthentic or harmful contents. Despite the existence of a number of trust management schemes in the literature for combating against free riding and distribution of malicious files, these mechanisms are not scalable due to their high computational, communication and storage overhead. This paper presents a trust management scheme for P2P networks that minimizes distribution of spurious files by a novel topology adaptation scheme. It also reduces search time since most of the queries are resolved within the community of trustworthy peers. Simulation results indicate that the trust management overhead due to the proposed mechanism decreases considerably as the network topology stabilizes.

arXiv (Cornell University), 2016

To mitigate the attacks by malicious peers and to motivate the peers to share the resources in peer-to-peer networks, several reputation systems have been proposed in the past. In most of them, the peers evaluate other peers based on their past interactions and then aggregate this information in the whole network. However such an aggregation process requires approximations in order to converge at some global consensus. It may not be the true reflection of past behavior of the peers. Moreover such type of aggregation gives only the relative ranking of peers without any absolute evaluation of their past. This is more significant when all the peers responding to a query, are malicious. In such a situation, we can only know that who is better among them without knowing their rank in the whole network. In this paper, we are proposing a new algorithm which accounts for the past behavior of the peers and will estimate the absolute value of the trust of peers. Consequently, we can suitably identify them as a good peers or malicious peers. Our algorithm converges at some global consensus much faster by choosing suitable parameters. Because of its absolute nature it will equally load all the peers in network. It will also reduce the inauthentic download in the network which was not possible in existing algorithms.

Peers are more likely to get exposed to malicious activities in P2P system due to its open nature, building the trust environment in P2P can mitigate these attacks. This paper is about the implementation of SORT model in peer to peer systems. The SORT model deals with the isolation of malicious and trusted peer in the LAN (Local Area Network). The isolation is done on the basis of the file uploaded by a peer, i.e. if he uploads an infected file in the proximity then the SORT model restricts the download of the infected file and thus protect the other peers from getting affected by the virus. File download is treated as an interaction. On each interaction there is calculation of some trust factor and the values are assigned by the downloader according to his satisfaction. Every peer calculates its own trust values regarding to other peers. These values are need to decide the further interactions in the network. Two types of attacks are mitigated by this model are Service based and Recommendation based. This project mainly deals with the security in the P2P system and acknowledges the peer whether the service he wants to use is clean or infected. This Project is implemented in Advanced JAVA and the MySQL database is used. The MVC architecture is used for building of this project. Peer calculate the trust metrics of each peer in its proximity they does this locally and do not tend to be global.

This paper presents a way of reducing the risk involved with downloading corrupt content from unknown (and hence untrusted) prin- cipals in a P2P network. This paper gives a brief overview of the need for trust in P2P networks, introduces a new notion called trust*, and shows how this may be used in place of the conventional notion of trust. Finally, we apply trust* to the Turtle P2P client and show how the in- tegrity of downloaded content can be guaranteed without assuming that trust is transitive.

The Journal of Supercomputing, 2011

With emerging Internet-scale open content and resource sharing, social networks, and complex cyber-physical systems, trust issues become prominent. In this paper, we propose a trust vector based scheme (VectorTrust) for aggregation of distributed trust scores. Leveraging a Bellman-Ford based algorithm for fast trust score aggregation, VectorTrust features localized and distributed concurrent communication. A VectorTrust-enabled system is decentralized by nature and does not rely on any centralized server or centralized trust aggregation. We design, implement, and analyze trust aggregation and trust management strategies. To evaluate the performance, we design and implement a VectorTrust simulator (VTSim) in an unstructured P2P network. The analysis and simulation results demonstrate the efficiency, accuracy, scalability and robustness of VectorTrust scheme. On average, VectorTrust converges faster and involves less computational complexity than most existing trust schemes. VectorTrust remains robust and tolerant to malicious peers and malicious behaviors. With dynamic growth of P2P network scales and topology complexities, VectorTrust scales well with reasonable overheads (O(lgN) communication overheads) and fast convergence speed (about O(lgN) steps).

TURKISH JOURNAL OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING & COMPUTER SCIENCES, 2018

Detecting malicious peers is a challenging task in peer-to-peer networks due to their decentralized structure and lack of central authority. Trust models can help identify malicious peers by maintaining information about peer relations and interactions. Keeping information about trust relations helps to reduce risks when providing or using services. This paper introduces two consistency concepts in trust management. Feedback consistency is used to evaluate how consistent feedback is with respect to past feedbacks. On the other side, peer consistency measures consistency of a peer's past feedbacks. These metrics help to reduce malicious interactions and increase successful downloads. Furthermore, the model offers better service quality for good peers by using consistency metrics. A file-sharing application is implemented on a simulation environment. The proposed model can effectively reduce the malicious download rate, even in 50% malicious environments, and increases successful download rates.

Sensors, 2022

In P2P networks, self-organizing anonymous peers share different resources without a central entity controlling their interactions. Peers can join and leave the network at any time, which opens the door to malicious attacks that can damage the network. Therefore, trust management systems that can ensure trustworthy interactions between peers are gaining prominence. This paper proposes AntTrust, a trust management system inspired by the ant colony. Unlike other ant-inspired algorithms, which usually adopt a problem-independent approach, AntTrust follows a problem-dependent (problem-specific) heuristic to find a trustworthy peer in a reasonable time. It locates a trustworthy file provider based on four consecutive trust factors: current trust, recommendation, feedback, and collective trust. Three rival trust management paradigms, namely, EigenTrust, Trust Network Analysis with Subjective Logic (TNA-SL), and Trust Ant Colony System (TACS), were tested to benchmark the performance of An...

Computers, Materials & Continua, 2019

Trust has become an increasingly important issue given society's growing reliance on electronic transactions. Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are among the main electronic transaction environments affected by trust issues due to the freedom and anonymity of peers (users) and the inherent openness of these networks. A malicious peer can easily join a P2P network and abuse its peers and resources, resulting in a large-scale failure that might shut down the entire network. Therefore, a plethora of researchers have proposed trust management systems to mitigate the impact of the problem. However, due to the problem's scale and complexity, more research is necessary. The algorithm proposed here, HierarchTrust, attempts to create a more reliable environment in which the selection of a peer provider of a file or other resource is based on several trust values represented in hierarchical form. The values at the top of the hierarchical form are more trusted than those at the lower end of the hierarchy. Trust, in HierarchTrust, is generally calculated based on the standard deviation. Evaluation via simulation showed that HierarchTrust produced a better success rate than the well-established EigenTrust algorithm.