Reputation-Based Trust Systems for P2P Applications: Design Issues and Comparison Framework

In Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing area trust issues have gained focus as a result of the decentralized nature of P2P systems where autonomous peers interact with each other without relying on any central authority. There is, thus, the need of a trust system to ensure a level of robustness against malicious nodes. Various reputation-based trust models have been proposed for P2P systems which use similar concepts but focus on different aspects and address different set of design issues. As a result, there is a clear need to investigate the design aspects of reputation-based trust systems that could be deployed in P2P applications. In this paper we present the basic elements and design issues of such systems and compare representative approaches, aiming at supporting the design of reputation systems suitable for particular P2P applications.