Practical trust management without reputation in peer-to-peer games

The development of complex applications that use the Peer-to-Peer computing model is restrained by security and trust management concerns, despite evident performance benefits. An example of such an application of P2P computing is P2P Massive Multi-user Online Games, where cheating by players is simple without centralized control or specialized trust management mechanisms. The article presents new techniques for trust enforcement that use cryptographic methods and are adapted to the dynamic membership and resources of P2P systems. The proposed approach to trust management differs significantly from previous work in the area that mainly used reputation. The paper describes a comprehensive trust management infrastructure for P2P MMO games that enables to recognize and exclude cheating players while keeping the performance overhead as low as possible. While the architecture requires trusted centralized components (superpeers), their role in trust management is limited to a minimum and the performance gains of using the P2P computing model are preserved. The performance of the proposed trust management architecture is validated by a prototype implementation in an MMO game.