hiREP: Hierarchical reputation management for peer-to-peer systems

The open feature of peer-to-peer systems invites the spread of the malfunctioning data. Additional reputation systems are constructed to guarantee the data authenticity. One challenge in these systems is how to store and spread trust value securely and efficiently. Devoid of a central control system, most of the recently proposed P2P reputation systems adopt flooding based polling mechanisms, which need to inquire into every node in the system. The polling mechanisms create heavy traffic, do not guarantee voter anonymity, and make it hard for peers to filter out the fake trust values. In this paper, we propose a reputation management system - hiREP to address these problems. A peer in hiREP system only needs to contact a small group of reputation agents to obtain the trust values. hiREP guarantees data authenticity and voter anonymity, and also makes it easier for peers to filter out fake trust values.