A Role Based Trust Model for Peer to Peer Systems Using Credential Trees

This paper deals with a Role based Trust (RT) model for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. P2P networks are essentially decentralized in nature to enhance resource sharing and collaboration. The anonymous and open nature of P2P systems offers an almost ideal environment for unauthorized access of digital content and also for easy distribution of malware. Today’s popular P2P systems have to challenge the attacks by anonymous malicious peers. RT is a Trust Management framework for P2P networks where access control decisions are based on policy statements, called credentials, made by different principals and stored in a distributed manner. This paper explains the approach of building credential trees for credential chain construction. Credential trees overcome the cyclic dependency problem of credential graphs which may lead to non-termination. The credential trees are used for evaluating trust relationships.