SYNOPSIS

Synopsis

Synopsis

Introduction

There has been a tremendous success and progression of peer to peer systems. The wide use of peer to peer systems over the internet included important activities like sharing of important files and documents, live streaming of videos, audio conferencing and overlay routing. The significance of the use of peer to peer systems can be seen as in 2006, P2P traffic accounted for more than 72% of the total internet traffic that year.

Peer to Peer systems work on the premises of honest and truthful cooperation among the peers. However, this cannot be ensured as internet is an open environment and several activities can be performed which may not be conducive to the peers. There may be peers who have selfish intentions, and may not be willing to share data, or go to the extreme of launching attacks through network viruses. Such activities or behaviors which are attacking in nature, unusual, or uncooperative, are called as malicious actions. Peers involved in malicious actions are known as malicious peers. (Liang, 2005)

There is a reputation system which is used to recognize malicious peers and well behaved peers. Peers are given a value based on their history of performances. According to their reputation, peers are then provided differentiated services. The components of the reputation system -collection of information pertaining to Peer behavior, rankings assigned to peers, and responding according to the peers score- have concerns like scalability, adaption to peer dynamics and security. Furthermore, the reputation systems have two main issues which are reputation estimation and reputation query.

Reputation estimation

This method involves estimation of peer reputation based on feedbacks reported by others. The method can be classified into three types which are social network, probabilistic estimation, and game theoretic model.

Social Network

The category of social network can be further categorized ...