A Secure Hybrid Reputation Management System for Super-Peer Networks

In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid system for handling reputation in super-peer-based networks by combining the personal history of each user´s interactions with other users, the opinions of peer-friends together with global ratings of peers as they emerge from all of their interactions with other users of the network. We introduce the notion of peer friends in a P2P network and use it to prevent malicious collectives from reducing the reputation of a peer in the network. We also present a secure distributed framework that ensures that trust reports remain encrypted and are never opened during the submission or aggregation process. Computational results from our distributed prototype simulation show that our solution compares favorably with all other proposed methods for handling reputation when subject to various malicious strategies.