Reputation based approach for improved fairness and robustness in P2P protocols

• Type: Article in International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2019

Authors

Nwebonyi, FN (Author) Other; Martins, R (Author) FCUP; Manuel E Correia (Author) FCUP

Journal

Title: Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications

Vol. 12

Pages: 951-968

ISSN: 1936-6442

Publisher: Springer Nature

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge - 12 Citations

Scopus - 13 Citations

Scientific classification

FOS: Natural sciences > Computer and information sciences

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-00Q-001

DOI: 10.1007/s12083-018-0701-x

Abstract (EN): Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlay networks have gained popularity due to their robustness, cost advantage, network efficiency and openness. Unfortunately, the same properties that foster their success, also make them prone to several attacks. To mitigate these attacks, several scalable security mechanisms which are based on the concepts of trust and reputation have been proposed. These proposed methods tend to ignore some core practical requirements that are essential to make them more useful in the real world. Some of such requirements include efficient bootstrapping of each newcomer's reputation, and mitigating seeder(s) exploitation. Additionally, although interaction among participating peers is usually the bases for reputation, the importance given to the frequency of interaction between the peers is often minimized or ignored. This can result in situations where barely known peers end-up having similar trust scores to the well-known and consistently cooperative nodes. After a careful review of the literature, this work proposes a novel and scalable reputation based security mechanism that addresses the aforementioned problems. The new method offers more efficient reputation bootstrapping, mitigation of bandwidth attack and better management of interaction rate, which further leads to improved fairness. To evaluate its performance, the new reputation model has been implemented as an extension of the BitTorrent protocol. Its robustness was tested by exposing it to popular malicious behaviors in a series of extensive PeerSim simulations. Results show that the proposed method is very robust and can efficiently mitigate popular attacks on P2P overlay networks.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 18