Q-Chain: building reputation based trust chains in decentralized peer-to-peer networks

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are increasingly gaining acceptance over the Internet as they provide an infrastructure for content search and exchange between anonymous peers. The open and anonymous nature of P2P networks exposes a number of security vulnerabilities including the problem of finding reliable trustworthy communication partners. In this paper, we propose Q-Chain which provides a trust computation framework by building reputation based trust chains in decentralized P2P networks. Separate Q-Chains are established to evaluate trustworthiness of a peer for the different content types it provides to other peers in the P2P network. A peer's trust rating value is present across several Q-Chains which makes trust computation and management more fault-tolerant in a highly dynamic P2P environment. We implemented Q-Chain using GnutellaSim simulator and the trust computation results obtained are encouraging and more accurate than some of the existing models