Major Area Examination
Gayatri Swamynathan
Wednesday, March 9th, 2005
10am - CTL (Trailer 932)
Committee: Kevin Almeroth (chair), Ben Zhao, Rich Wolski
Title: Reputation Management in Decentralized Networks
Abstract:
The Internet today has resulted in the steady growth of highly decentralized and self-organizing networks. The open and anonymous nature of these networks makes them vulnerable to attacks from malicious and self-interested peers. Hence, distrust runs high. The lack of a common goal among the peers of the network or of a common control managing them aggravates the threats.
One way to minimize threats in such networks is to build reputation-based trust mechanisms to assess the trustworthiness of peers. The predictive power of reputation depends on the supposition that past behavior is indicative of future behavior. The higher the reputation profile of a peer, the more trustworthy it is deemed to be. Hence, reputation systems secure decentralized networks by motivating honest participation among the peers in the network, desisting and penalizing cheaters.
In this talk, we will discuss reputation management in decentralized networks. How do we build a trust model? How is reputation information collected and stored, and where? How are the individual reputation ratings processed to form a peer's reputation profile? Is the reputation profile fool-proof? How do we prevent false ratings? These are some of the questions that motivate us.
We have identified five important aspects of reputation management in our research, namely, reputation production, the trust model, reputation storage, the exchange protocol and safeguarding reputation from attacks. In this talk, we will discuss these aspects of reputation management in detail. We will also discuss how different research groups have tackled the design issues pertaining to each aspect of reputation management, and the challenges and implications of the proposed approaches.
Everyone is welcome!