Sorcery: Overcoming deceptive votes in P2P content sharing systems

Abstract

Deceptive voting behaviors of malicious users are known as the main reason of causing content pollution in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) content sharing systems. Due to the nature of P2P overlay network such as self-organization and anonymity, the existing methods on identifying deceptive votes are not effective, especially for collusive attackers. This paper presents Sorcery, a novel active challenge-response mechanism based on the notion that one side of interaction with the dominant information can detect whether the other side is telling a lie. To make each client obtain the dominant information, our approach introduces the social network to the P2P content sharing system; therefore, clients can establish the friend-relationships with the users who are either acquaintances in reality or those reliable online friends. Using the confidential voting histories of friends as own dominant information, the client challenges target content providers with the overlapping votes of both his friends and the target content provider, thus detecting whether the content provider is a deceptive user. Moreover, Sorcery provides the punishment mechanism which can reduce the impact brought by deceptive voting behaviors, and our work also discusses some key practical issues. The experimental results illustrate that Sorcery can effectively overcome the problem of deceptive voting behaviors in P2P content sharing systems, and work better than the existing reputation models.