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Collusive piracy is the main source of intellectual property violations within the boundary of a P2P network. Paid clients (colluders) may illegally share copyrighted content files with unpaid clients (pirates). Such online piracy has hindered the use of open P2P networks for commercial content delivery. We propose a proactive content poisoning scheme to stop colluders and pirates from alleged copyright infringements in P2P file sharing. The basic idea is to detect pirates timely with identity-based signatures and time-stamped tokens. The scheme stops collusive piracy without hurting legitimate P2P clients by targeting poisoning on detected violators, exclusively. We developed a new peer authorization protocol (PAP) to distinguish pirates from legitimate clients. Detected pirates will receive poisoned chunks in their repeated attempts, Pirates are thus severely penalized with no chance to download successfully in tolerable time. Based on simulation results we find 99.9 percent prevention rate in Gnutella KaZaA and Freenet. We achieved 85-98 percent prevention rate on eMule, eDonkey, Morpheus, etc. The scheme is shown less effective in protecting some poison-resilient networks like BitTorrent and Azureus. Our work opens up the low-cost P2P technology for copyrighted content delivery. The advantage lies mainly in minimum delivery cost, higher content availability, and copyright compliance in exploring P2P network resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) reputation systems are essential to evaluate the trustworthiness of participating peers and to combat the selfish, dishonest, and malicious peer behaviors. The system collects locally-generated peer feedbacks and aggregates them to yield the global reputation scores. Surprisingly, most previous work ignored the distribution of peer feedbacks. We use a trust overlay network (TON) to model the trust relationships among peers. After examining the eBay transaction trace of over 10,000 users, we discover a power-law distribution in user feedbacks. Our mathematical analysis justifies that power-law distribution is applicable to any dynamically growing P2P systems, either structured or unstructured. We develop a robust and scalable P2P reputation system, PowerTrust, to leverage the power-law feedback characteristics. The PowerTrust system dynamically selects small number of power nodes that are most reputable using a distributed ranking mechanism. By using a look-ahead random walk strategy and leveraging the power nodes, PowerTrust significantly improves in global reputation accuracy and aggregation speed. PowerTrust is adaptable to dynamics in peer joining and leaving and robust to disturbance by malicious peers. Through P2P network simulation experiments, we find significant performance gains in using PowerTrust. This power-law guided reputation system design proves to achieve high query success rate in P2P file-sharing applications. The system also reduces the total job makespan and failure rate in large-scale, parameter-sweeping P2P Grid applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of two P2P reputation systems--FuzzyTrust and EigenTrust--at establishing trust among the peers in P2P applications. The FuzzyTrust prototype system was developed for evaluating peer reputation in P2P transactions. FuzzyTrust was built with the fuzzy-logic inference technique. In particular, the system is capable of handling imprecise or uncertain information collection from the peers. The EigenTrust algorithm proposed at Stanford University calculates global peer reputation by considering the entire system's history.