A Study of Mutual Authentication for P2P Trust Management

Current study of P2P trust management mainly focuses on identifying malicious servers who could attack other peers by providing vicious resources in a P2P file-sharing network. This trust management based on one-way authentication has few effects in reducing denial-of-service attacks of malicious consumers and free riding of selfish peers. In this paper, we introduce mutual authentication to P2P trust management and propose a trust model based on mutual authentication (MA model). The model is built on two kinds of authentication mechanism: server and consumer authentic-cation mechanism. Server authentication mechanism is used to identify malicious servers, and consumer authentication mechanism is employed to handle requests from consumers. The implementation strategies of MA model are also described. The simulation shows that MA model is more effective on suppressing malicious servers and consumers, or even encouraging selfish peers to share their resources.