H-Trust: A Group Trust Management System for Peer-to-Peer Desktop Grid

Peer-to-Peer Desktop Grid (P2PDG) has emerged as a pervasive cyber-infrastructure tackling many large-scale applications with high impacts. As a burgeoning research area, P2PDG can support numerous applications, including scientific computing, file sharing, web services, and virtual organization for collaborative activities and projects. To handle trustworthiness issues of these services, trust and reputation schemes are proposed to establish trust among peers in P2PDG. In this paper, we propose a robust group trust management system, called H-Trust, inspired by the H-index aggregation technique. Leveraging the robustness of the H-index algorithm under incomplete and uncertain circumstances, H-Trust offers a robust personalized reputation evaluation mechanism for both individual and group trusts with minimal communication and computation overheads. We present the H-Trust scheme in five phases, including trust recording, local trust evaluation, trust query phase, spatial-temporal update phase, and group reputation evaluation phases. The rationale for its design, the analysis of the algorithm are further investigated. To validate the performance of H-Trust scheme, we designed the H-Trust simulator HTrust-Sim to conduct multi-agent-based simulations. Simulation results demonstrate that H-Trust is robust and can identify and isolate malicious peers in large scale systems even when a large portion of peers are malicious.