Distributed Trust Management

Peer-to-peer systems are an attractive means of sharing data and services. However, the problem of how to efficiently decide which peers are to be trusted still remains unsolved. We are describing EigenTrust [3], a protocol for reputation management in peer-to-peer networks. We compare it to four more protocols for decentralized trust management we present, namely P2PRep [2], RCertPX [4], P-Grid [1], and TrustMe [5]. 1 Distributed Trust Management Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have attracted a lot of interest, as a highly dynamic platform that enables autonomous computing nodes to share resources and services. The advantages of peer-to-peer environments, especially of unstructured ones, include their ability for self-organization, for adaptation to different loads, and for resiliency to node failures. Operation of all the peers as both clients and servers, and without a central coordinator eliminates possible bottlenecks in terms of scalability or reliability. However, in an unstructured and decentralized topology several security issues arise. One of the most challenging problems, that is still being actively ∗Course Project Report for CS236 Database Management Systems, Fall 2004.