TrustGuard: countering vulnerabilities in reputation management for decentralized overlay networks

Reputation systems have been popular in estimating the trustworthiness and predicting the future behavior of nodes in a large-scale distributed system where nodes may transact with one another without prior knowledge or experience. One of the fundamental challenges in distributed reputation management is to understand vulnerabilities and develop mechanisms that can minimize the potential damages to a system by malicious nodes. In this paper, we identify three vulnerabilities that are detrimental to decentralized reputation management and propose TrustGuard - a safeguard framework for providing a highly dependable and yet efficient reputation system. First, we provide a dependable trust model and a set of formal methods to handle strategic malicious nodes that continuously change their behavior to gain unfair advantages in the system. Second, a transaction based reputation system must cope with the vulnerability that malicious nodes may misuse the system by flooding feedbacks with fake...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Mudhakar Srivatsa, Li Xiong, Ling Liu
• Keywords: Distributed Reputation Management, Internet Technology, Malicious Nodes, Strategic Malicious Nodes, WWW 2005