PowerTrust: A Robust and Scalable Reputation System for Trusted Peer-to-Peer Computing

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) reputation systems are essential to evaluate the trustworthiness of participating peers and to combat the selfish, dishonest, and malicious peer behaviors. The system collects locally-generated peer feedbacks and aggregates them to yield the global reputation scores. Surprisingly, most previous work ignored the distribution of peer feedbacks. We use a trust overlay network (TON) to model the trust relationships among peers. After examining the eBay transaction trace of over 10,000 users, we discover a power-law distribution in user feedbacks. Our mathematical analysis justifies that power-law distribution is applicable to any dynamically growing P2P systems, either structured or…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• UO
  University of Southern California