Handling changes of update reviewers in distributed free and open-source software meta-recommendations

Abstract

In Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) world, newer is not always better! Automatically updating to the latest version of FOSS applications involves real risks. The newer version could be missing some features, that are essential to some users, but are dropped by the developers. Another possible scenario, with even more serious consequences, is a project taken over by malicious developers who target users' sensitive data, or do other types of damage to their systems. In this research, we improve on the existing FOSS Updates Meta-Recommendations framework, which is shown (in [2], [3]) to increase resistance to certain attacks. We study how to handle more efficiently the situations where reviewers join and/or leave the P2P network, without a significant impact on the accuracy of recommendations or the performance of the system. We investigate some approaches: self-announcement by reviewer, the use of Zero/negative trust weights, introducing Drop/remove messages, and Message Aging. We also introduce some improvements on the message exchanging mechanism utilized by the current framework, to accommodate the newly added functionalities.