Expanding trust beyond reputation in peer-to-peer systems

The issue of trust in peer-to-peer (P2P) needs to be addressed, especially if it is to evolve into a general information exchange system beyond file sharing. Mechanisms must be included, either directly into the peer-to-peer protocols, or as a separate protocol that is used with the peer-to-peer protocol. We propose a universal trust set based on Bayesian network that is user extensible, and a protocol on usage of trust data. The flexibility of this approach allows it to work like the trust models that have been proposed, and also allows for implementing more complex and fully encompassing models.