Combining data trust in reputation systems to boost P2P security

Open and anonymous communication networks like Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems promise to eliminate the scalability concerns and central vulnerability points. But P2P systems are often insecure and provide an opportunity for viruses and distributed denial of service (DDoS) activities to spread due to the fact that there is no method to verify the trustworthiness of users and shared files. To make such P2P networks more resilient against the attacks, this paper proposes the use of reputation systems in which the trust will cover both data and users. Therefore, the reputation-based P2P security can lead to auto-adaptive secure operating systems that automatically change the trust levels of the user and the data that the user provides.