P2PFeedbackSystems.PDFVIP

Project Description P2P Feedback Systems Kai Wang (wangkai@) Faculty Advisor: Sanjeev Khanna Project Description Abstract: A P2P credit system allows users who upload more to gain an advantage over someone who uploads less. Someone who has a higher credit should be able to get files faster. This gives the user incentive to continue its use on this network. KaZaa was probably one of the most popular P2P programs for a while because it was fast and had a credit system (called participation level) which allowed you to skip queues. Unfortunately their system was easily hacked. Currently 2 other popular softwares use a similar credit system, eMule and Bittorrent. eMule is a client built on top of the eDonkey network and it keeps a credit system on a per user basis but no global credit system is implemented. In Bittorrent the same thing is considered but it is limited to a particular file and not a particular user. The problem with both of these systems is that it does not give incentive to be an active sharer or user on the network because credit is not global and is rather limited in its scope. I’d like to propose a new system that can combine the advantages of these systems. My credit system would allow fair sharing and does not allow credit cheating. The main part of the project will demonstrate the viability and effectiveness of my credit system on a P2P network. I will propose attack scenarios and show how my system counters them. Focus will be on a hack-proof implementation that scales well to bigger networks. One of the biggest problems today is to distinguish the “bad participants” from the “good participants”. This is a common problem also in eBay where groups of people (or the same person) has different accounts and try to raise each other’s ratings or