Mitigation of malware proliferation in P2P networks using double-layer dynamic trust (DDT) management scheme

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networking enables users with similar interests to exchange, contribute, or obtain files. This network model has been proven popular to exchange music, pictures, or software applications. These files are saved, and most likely executed, at the downloading host. At the expense of this mechanism, worms, viruses, and malware find an open front door to the downloading host and gives them a convenient environment for successful proliferation throughout the network. Although virus detection software is currently available, this countermeasure works in a reactive fashion, and in most times, in an isolated manner. In this paper, we consider a trust management scheme to contain the proliferation of viruses in P2P networks. Specifically, we propose a cooperative and distributed trust management scheme based on a two-layer approach to bound the proliferation of viruses. The new scheme is called double-layer dynamic trust (DDT) management scheme. Our results show that the proposed scheme bounds the proliferation of malware. With the proposed scheme, the number of infected hosts and the proliferation rate are limited to small values. In addition, we show that network activity is not discouraged by using the proposed scheme.