Trust-Based Privacy Preservation for Peer-to-Peer Data Sharing

Privacy preservation in a peer-to-peer system tries to hide the association between the identity of a participant and the data that it is interested in. The authors propose a trust-based privacy preservation method for peer-to-peer data sharing. It adopts the trust relation between a peer and its collaborators (buddies). The buddy works as a proxy to send the request and acquire the data. This provides a shield under which the identity of the requester and the accessed data cannot be linked. A privacy measuring method is presented to evaluate the proposed mechanism. Dynamic trust assessment and the enhancement to supplier's privacy are discussed.