A distributed reputation and trust management scheme for mobile peer-to-peer networks

In peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, trust ratings aggregation and peer ranking are unreliable, time-consuming and space-demanding operations. The swift expansion of emerging P2P techniques towards the domain of mobile computing poses significant challenges for trust and security management. Several trust management schemes have been proposed recently to counter the security threat on P2P systems. However, due to the difficulties caused by system mobility and dynamic network topology, there is an increasing requirement of decentralized and distributed trust management schemes. In this paper, we initially investigate and analyze four typical decentralized and distributed trust management schemes. Based on the findings of this analysis, a robust distributed reputation and trust management scheme, referred to as M-trust, is proposed for mobile P2P networks. The new scheme utilizes confidence in reputation, based on interactions among peers, to reduce the computation complexity. Furthermore, distributed algorithms are presented for accurate and reliable trust ratings aggregation and space management. The performance of M-trust is evaluated in comparison to the existing schemes using extensive simulation experiments. The results demonstrate that M-trust possesses the excellent overall performance in terms of accuracy, reliability, convergence speed, and detection rate under various constraints of mobility, trust threshold and network out-degree. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.