HonestPeer: An enhanced EigenTrust algorithm for reputation management in P2P systems

The visible success of the Peer to Peer (P2P) paradigm is associated with many challenges in finding trustworthy peers as reliable communication partners. Reputation management systems are emerging in the face of these challenges. The EigenTrust reputation management system is among the most known and successful reputation systems. On the other hand, a main drawback of this system is its reliance on a set of pre-trusted peers which causes nodes to center around them. As a consequence, other peers are ranked low despite being honest, marginalizing their effect in the system. To tackle this problem, this paper proposed enhancing the EigenTrust algorithm by giving peers with high reputation values (honest peers) a role in calculating the global reputation of other peers. Rather than solely depending on the static group of pre-trusted peers, the proposed algorithm, HonestPeer, selects the most reputable nodes, honest peers, dynamically based on the quality of the provided files. This makes HonestPeer more robust to the increase in the number of files and nodes in the system. Through simulation, it has been shown that HonestPeer has successfully maintained higher success rate and lower percentage of inauthentic downloads when compared to the original algorithm.