A challenge-based trust establishment protocol for peer-to-peer networks

Establishing trust relationships between peers is an essential approach to prevent threats. Most current approaches concentrate on polling algorithms to evaluate peer trustworthiness, but these approaches are either system-expensive or inefficient. In this paper, we propose a concrete challenge-based trust protocol for P2P networks. Our protocol uses challenge-response operations in each trust evaluation phase and validates every contacted peer along with recording their corresponding trust value. The scheme in our protocol utilizes random selection of challenges, and does not reveal additional information, so malicious peers have little opportunity to tamper with the P2P systems. Simulation results show our protocol saves communication cost by around 90%. We suggest a tolerance value of 0.2 which gives a design reference for implementing new P2P trust-establishing protocols. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.