A robust reputation system for the grid

Core-GRID Technical Report: TR- …, 2007

This paper reviews the main reputation-based trust systems. We directed our analysis trying to identify how these systems fulfill the requirements of grid computing, anticipating a further inclusion of reputation-based technologies for bringing trust in grid systems. We analyzed a wide area of developments, from reputation systems used in ecommerce to systems coming from agent research, P2P and Grids.

2014 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence, 2014

The Agent in Grid (AiG) project aims to develop an agent-based infrastructure that facilitates the resource management in the Grid. The core assumptions behind the system are: software agents representing Grid resources work in teams, and all information is ontologically represented and semantically processed. Thus far, trust management in AiG system is approached from the perspective of breaching an agreement between Users and teams or contracts between teams and Workers. Unfortunately, it is also possible that some Workers, which fulfilled the agreement, could have maliciously returned incorrect results from the jobs that they executed. In this paper, we discuss how the trust management in the AiG project can be improved by using a reputation-based voting technique, in order to assure reliable job execution.

Future Generation Computer Systems, 2010

Hidden information is a critical issue for the successful delivery of services in grid systems. It arises when the agents (hardware and software resources) employed to serve a task belong to multiple administrative domains, thus rendering monitoring of remote resource provision absent or unreliable. Therefore, the grid service broker can often observe only the outcome of the collective effort of groups of agents rather than their individual efforts, which makes it hard to identify cases of free-riding or low-performing agents. In this paper, we first identify cases of hidden information in grid systems and explain why they cannot be handled satisfactorily by the existing accounting systems. Second, we develop and evaluate a reputationbased mechanism enabling the grid service broker to deal effectively with hidden information. Our mechanism maintains a reputation metric for each agent; we propose and evaluate several approaches on how to update this metric based only on the observations of collective outcomes. We also provide recommendation on which such an approach is preferable for a grid service broker in collaborative or competitive environments.

Security is a principal concern in offering an infrastructure for the formation of general-purpose computational grids. A number of grid implementations have been devised to deal with the security concerns by authenticating the users, hosts and their interactions in an appropriate fashion. Resource management systems that are sophisticated and secured are inevitable for the efficient and beneficial deployment of grid computing services. The chief factors that can be problematic in the secured selection of grid resources are the wide range of selection and the high degree of strangeness. Moreover, the lack of a higher degree of confidence relationship is likely to prevent efficient resource allocation and utilisation. In this paper, we present an efficient approach for the secured selection of grid resources, so as to achieve secure execution of the jobs. This approach utilises trust and reputation for securely selecting the grid resources. To start with, the self-protection capability and reputation weightage of all the entities are computed, and based on those values, the trust factor (TF) of all the entities are determined. The reputation weightage of an entity is the measure of both the user's feedback and other entities' feedback. Those entities with higher TF values are selected for the secured execution of jobs. To make the proposed approach more comprehensive, a novel method is employed for evaluating the user's feedback on the basis of the existing feedbacks available regarding the entities. This approach is proved to be scalable for an increased number of user jobs and grid entities. The experimentation portrays that this approach offers desirable efficiency in the secured selection of grid resources.

Security and Communication …, 2010

In collaborative systems, a set of organisations shares their computing resources, such as compute cycles, storage space, or on-line services, in order to establish Virtual Organisations aimed at achieving common tasks. The formation and operation of Virtual Organisations involve establishing trust among their members and reputation is one measure by which such trust can be quantified and reasoned about. In this paper, we contribute to research in the area of trust for collaborative computing systems along two directions: First, we provide a survey on the main reputation-based systems that fulfill the trust requirements for collaborative systems, including reputation systems designed for e-commerce, agent-based environments, Peer-to-Peer computing and Grid-based systems. Second, we present a model for reputation management for Grid Virtual Organisations that is based on utility computing and that can be used to rate users according to their resource usage and resources and their providers according to the quality of service they deliver. We also demonstrate, through Grid simulations, how the model can be used in improving completion and welfare in Virtual Organisations.

Computers & Security, 2013

Trust and reputation models play an important role in enabling trusted computations over large-scale distributed grids. Many models have been recently proposed and implemented within trust management systems. Nevertheless, the existing approaches usually assess performance of models in terms of resource management while less attention is paid to the analysis of security threat scenarios for such models. In this paper, we assess the most important and critical security threats for a utility-based reputation model in grids. The existing model is extended to address these threat scenarios. With simulations that were run using data collected from the EGEE Grid-Observatory project, we analyse efficiency of the utility-based reputation model against these threats.

2012

The primary concern in area of computational grid is security and resources. Most of the existing grids address this problem by authenticating the users, hosts and their interactions in an appropriate manner. A secured system is compulsory for the efficient utilization of grid services. The high degree of strangeness has been identified as the problem factors in the secured selection of grid. Without the assurance of a higher degree of trust relationship, competent resource selection and utilization cannot be achieved. In this paper we proposed an approach which is providing reliability and reputation aware security for resource selection in grid environment. In this approach, the self-protection capability and reputation weightage is utilized to obtain the Reliability Factor (RF) value. Therefore jobs are allocated to the resources that posses higher RF values. Extensive experimental evaluation shows that as higher trust and reliable nodes are selected the chances of failure decreased drastically.

2007

Trust management is an important issue in a grid environment where consumers and service providers are distributed geographically across autonomous administrative domains. In this paper, we propose reputation-based trust management architecture through the use of intermediaries, brokers. This architecture insists on multiple brokers in each domain. The entities (Consumers and the SPs) are distributed across these brokers, with each of these entities being associated with more than one broker. This improves the redundancy of information maintained at the broker sites, thereby improving the reliability. This also eases the network traffic at the broker sites while handling consumer requests and feedbacks. The issues rising out of such an arrangement of multiple brokers, namely the distribution of entities among the brokers and maintenance of consistency of information across the brokers, are addressed well in this paper. Trust-indices of SPs and consumers are evaluated and updated dynamically after the completion of each transaction. This enables the consumer to receive the response from the broker significantly quicker compared to other reputation-based-trust models where the trust-indices are computed at the request-time. To further improve the response time of each transaction, a B-tree indexing scheme has been proposed. Trust parameters such as satisfaction-value, number, cost and criticality of transactions, and different weights for past and recent transactions are considered for the trust evaluation. Our model shows a marked improvement in job success rate for various percentages of malicious entities. The selection query cost for each transaction is reduced thereby improving the overall response time is show-cased in this model. The impact of broker's feedback on the computation of trust-indices is also presented

Proceedings of the 11th Wseas International Conference on Software Engineering Parallel and Distributed Systems and Proceedings of the 9th Wseas International Conference on Engineering Education, 2012

Grid creates a service oriented marketplace where dynamic service level associations are setup among grid entities i.e. service providers (resources) and service consumers (application programs). Service level associations among grid entities depends upon many parameters such as performance, completion deadlines, reliability, trust and reputation of grid entities etc. In this paper a novel service level association between service provider and service consumer is proposed which depends upon trust and reputation component. Grid service is executed in a cooperative environment where a set of n resources is associated to the requesting application for execution. Resources in the set are included on the basis of their individual reputation and trust component. An overall reputation and trust component of the unit is computed from the reputation and trust of individual resources in the unit and which can be used for the allocation of application to the unit.

2004

Data integrity has to become one of the central concerns of large-scale distributed computing systems such as the Grid, whose primary products are the results of computation. In order to maintain the integrity of this data, the system must be resilient to diverse attacks and tampering. The system should also encourage positive influences on its integrity in addition to discouraging or eliminating negative ones. In this paper we develop a model of trust for Grid participants based on the use of reputation systems and associated feedback mechanisms.