A Robust and Efficient Trust Management Scheme for Peer-to-Peer Networks

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.