PeerTrust Overview

Project Goal

In an open peer-to-peer information system, peers often have to interact with unfamiliar peers and need to manage the risk that is involved with the interactions. PeerTrust aims to develop a trust mechanism for such system so peers can quantify and compare the trustworthiness of other peers and perform trusted interactions based on their past interaction histories without trusted third parties.

Research Challenges

1. How to build a trust model that assess the trustworthiness of peers accurately and effectively?
  • Accurate reflection of past experiences of peers
  • Robust against malicious behaviors of peers
  • Ability to adapt to different situations and communities

    2. How to implement the trust model in a decentralized and secure manner?

    3. How to use the trust model?

    4. Experimental evaluation of the approach

    PeerTrust Approach

    1. Trust model
  • Identification of primitive trust parameters
  • Trust metrics including the basic metric and a suite of extensible and adaptive metrics
  • Case study with complaint based feedback system

    2. Decentralized and secure trust management
  • Decentralized storage and lookup of trust data
  • PKI based secure trust data transmission


    3. Usage of the trust model
  • Trust based peer selection algorithm
  • Decentralized trust policy management

    4. Simulation based evaluation
  • Effectiveness of the mechanism
  • Cost of the mechanism
  • Benefit of the approach
  • Attack resistance under different attack scenarios