Trust path: a distributed model of search paths of trust in a peer‐to‐peer system

Abstract

AbstractTrust management is not an easy task in a peer‐to‐peer system because a peer is not able to know all the other peers in the system, and therefore, it is not obvious to exchange documents safely. Accordingly, an efficient model of trust management is necessary to manage the trust between peers in order to, quickly and efficiently, make the difference between potentially malicious and benevolent peers before downloading a document. Several approaches have been developed to calculate the indirect trust value. These approaches are based on sequential search of trust paths. In this paper and in order to optimize the research response time of trust paths, we propose a new distributed model called Trust_Path to search all trust paths between two peers that have no direct knowledge. This search is performed by propagation, in a distributed manner, to all known peers. The experiments realized on a network of 16 servers, on which we have set up virtual machines, show that the response time of search of trust paths with the parallel execution using Trust_Path model is much faster than sequential execution and that its acceleration increases according to the number of nodes. The simulation results show that our model can be applied to a large‐scale environment.Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.