Exploring the Feasibility of Proactive Reputations

Reputation mechanisms help peers in a Peer-To-Peer (P2P) system avoid unreliable or malicious peers. In application level networks, however, short peer lifetimes mean reputations are often generated from a small number of past transactions. These reputation values are less "Reliable,? and more vulnerable to badmouthing or collusion attacks. The authors address this issue by introducing proactive reputations, a firsthand history of transactions initiated to augment incomplete or short-term reputation values. They present several mechanisms for generating proactive reputations, along with a statistical similarity metric to measure their effectiveness.