Cooperative Trust Model for a Decentralised Peer-to-Peer E-Market

This article describes a trust model for use in a distributed peer-to-peer e-market with no central controlling node. The issue of trust in this kind of network is vitally important to its success as users are less likely to participate in a market with untrustworthy members. With no form of centralisation and control, peers must cooperate to determine which peers are trustworthy. The goal for this trust model is to make it hard for an illegitimate peer to participate in the network while making it easy and safe for legitimate peers to participate. The trust model presented in this article allows peers to work together to determine another peers trust value through cooperative message passing. It also provides a fair method for recognising potentially malicious peers through the responses they provide. Finally, we describe constraints which ensure the trust model maintains the scalability of the peer to peer network.