VectorTrust: trust vector aggregation scheme for trust management in peer-to-peer networks

With emerging Internet-scale open content and resource sharing, social networks, and complex cyber-physical systems, trust issues become prominent. Conventional trust mechanisms are inadequate at addressing trust issues in decentralized open environments. In this paper, we propose a trust vector based trust management scheme called VectorTrust for aggregation of distributed trust scores. Leveraging a Bellman–Ford based algorithm for fast and lightweight trust score aggregation, VectorTrust features localized and distributed concurrent communication. Built on a trust overlay network in a peer-to-peer network, a VectorTrust-enabled system is decentralized by nature and does not rely on any centralized server or centralized trust aggregation. We design, implement, and analyze trust rating, trust aggregation, and trust management strategies. To evaluate the performance, we design and implement a VectorTrust simulator (VTSim) in an unstructured P2P network. The analysis and simulation results demonstrate the efficiency, accuracy, scalability, and robustness of VectorTrust scheme. On average, VectorTrust converges faster and involves less complexity than most existing trust schemes. VectorTrust remains robust and tolerant to malicious peers and malicious behaviors. With dynamic growth of P2P network scales and topology complexities, VectorTrust scales well with reasonable overheads (about O(lg N) communication overheads) and fast convergence speed (about O(log DN) iterations).