A Novel Approach to Improve the Security of P2P File-Sharing Systems

The recent and unprecedented surge of public interest in peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing systems has led to a variety of interesting research questions. How to minimize threats in such an open community is an important research topic. Trust models have been widely used in estimating the trustworthiness of peers in P2P file-sharing systems where peers can transact with each other without prior experience. However, current P2P trust models almost take no consideration for the nature of trust, fuzzy, complex and dynamic, which results in low efficiency in resisting the attacks of malicious nodes. In this paper, a new trust model named NatureTrust that can alleviate the shortage brought by the nature of trust is proposed. In order to cope with the fuzzy characteristic of trust, linguistic terms are used to express trust. Additionally, fuzzy inference rules are employed to evaluate trust of each transaction so as to handle the complex characteristic of trust. Furthermore, risk factor is deployed into NatureTrust to represent and reason with the dynamic characteristic of trust. Both risk and trust factors are considered in evaluating the trustworthiness of each peer. Experimental results show that the trust model analyzed here thus stands against malicious act effectively.