GeTrust: A Guarantee-Based Trust Model in Chord-Based P2P Networks

More and more users are attracted by P2P networks characterized by decentralization, autonomy and anonymity. However, users’ unconstrained behavior makes it necessary to use a trust model when establishing trust relationships between peers. Most existing trust models are based on recommendations, which, however, suffer from the shortcomings of slow convergence and high complexity of trust computations, as well as huge overhead of network traffic. Inspired by the establishment of trust relationships in human society, a guarantee-based trust model, GeTrust, is proposed for Chord-based P2P networks. A service peer needs to choose its guarantee peer(s) for the service it is going to provide, and they are both required to pledge reputation mortgages for the service. The request peer makes evaluations on all the candidates of service peer by referring their service reputations and their guarantee peers’ reputations, and selects the one with highest evaluation to be its service provider. In order to enhance GeTrust's availability and prevent malicious behavior, we also present incentive mechanism and anonymous reputation management strategy. Simulation results show that GeTrust is effective and efficient in terms of improving successful transaction rate, resisting complex attacks, reducing network overhead and lowering computational complexity.