A Hierarchical Trust Model for Peer-to-Peer Networks

Trust has become an increasingly important issue given society’s growing reliance on electronic transactions. Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are among the main electronic transaction environments affected by trust issues due to the freedom and anonymity of peers (users) and the inherent openness of these networks. A malicious peer can easily join a P2P network and abuse its peers and resources, resulting in a large-scale failure that might shut down the entire network. Therefore, a plethora of researchers have proposed trust management systems to mitigate the impact of the problem. However, due to the problem’s scale and complexity, more research is necessary. The algorithm proposed here, HierarchTrust, attempts to create a more reliable environment in which the selection of a peer provider of a file or other resource is based on several trust values represented in hierarchical form. The values at the top of the hierarchical form are more trusted than those at the lower end of the hierarchy. Trust, in HierarchTrust, is generally calculated based on the standard deviation. Evaluation via simulation showed that HierarchTrust produced a better success rate than the well-established EigenTrust algorithm.