A mechanism based on reputation in P2P networks to counter malicious packet dropping

In P2P (Peer-to-Peer) networks, some malicious peers can impact on overall networks performance. One of the malicious behaviors of these peers is malicious packet dropping. In this paper, our focus is to detect and to exclude peers that misbehave by dropping some or all packets. Here, we propose a reputation-based mechanism for solving the problem efficiently. The proposed mechanism uses both direct reputation information and indirect reputation information to compute comprehensive reputation of a peer. At the same time, history reputation information is also taken into account to provide faults tolerance capability and we regulate the imprecision based on the fact that the cause of packet dropping can be complex. Finally, the peers with bad comprehensive reputation can be detected easily and then will be excluded from the network. In this way, our proposed mechanism improves the performance of P2P networks without increasing computational overhead.