Trusted Reputation Management Service for Peer-to-Peer Collaboration

The open and autonomous nature of peer-to-peer (P2P) systems invites the phenomenon of widespread decoys and free-riding. Reputation systems are constructed to ensure file authenticity and stimulate collaboration. We identify the authenticity, availability and privacy issues concerning the previous reputation management, schemes. We propose to add integrity control for the reputation storage/computation processing in order to enhance the authenticity of the resultant reputation values; and present; an integrity model to articulate necessary mechanisms and rules for integrity protection in a P2P reputation system. We design a fully-distributed and secure reputation management scheme, Trusted Reputation Management Service (TRMS). Employing Trusted Computing and Virtual Machine Technologies, a peer's reputation values and specific transaction records can be stored, accessed and updated in a tamper-proof way by the Trusted Reputation Agent (TRA) on the same platform, which guarantees the authenticity of reputation values. Transaction partners exchange directly with each other for reputation values, services and transaction comments with no reliance on a remote third party, ensuring the availability of reputation and peers' privacy.