Decentralized trust management for ad-hoc peer-to-peer networks

Modern mobile devices can form ad-hoc networks to autonomously share data and services. While such self-organizing, peer-to-peer communities offer exciting collaboration opportunities, deciding whether to trust another peer can be challenging. In this work we propose a decentralized trust management middleware for ad-hoc, peer-to-peer networks, based on reputation. Our middleware's protocols take advantage of the unstructured nature of the network to render malicious behavior, such as lying and colluding, risky. The reputation information of each peer is stored in its neighbors and piggy-backed on its replies. By simulating the behavior of networks both with and without a rating scheme we were able to show that just a few dishonest peers can flood the network with false results, whereas this phenomenon is virtually eliminated when using our middleware.