DistOS-2011W Reputation

Members

• Waheed Ahmed
• Trevor Gelowsky
  • MSN: Gelowt@gmail.com
  • E-Mail: tgelowsk@sce.carleton.ca
  • Current Status: Snowed-in somewhere in the outskirts of Orleans...
• Michael Du Plessis
• Nicolas Lessard

The problem

Emerge vs. Impose reputation on the system

What currently exists?

• Digital signatures
  • Certificates signed by trusted organizations

Public-key infrastructure

Introduction

In order to build secure chain of trust Public-Key Infrastructure is used for internet based communication. It consists of various things like security policy , Certificate authority , registration authority , certificate distribution system PKI enabled applications.

Uses and Need

With development of modern e-commerce based businesses which has minimal customer face-to-face interactions is demanding more security and integrity. The online web based stores where huge amount of transactions take place needs to ensure customers that there information is confidential and processed through a secure channel. This is where implementation of PKI steps in to provide mechanisms to ensure trusted relationships are established and maintained. The specific security functions in which a PKI can provide foundation are confidentiality, integrity, non-repudiation,and authentication.

Issues & Solutions

I found out there are many different implementations of PKI , and they all focuses on their own issues and solutions. For example PKI used in DoD have following issues

• Lack of PKI-enabled eCommerce applications and lack of interoperability among PKI applications

• DoD is developing a single high assurance PKI

• Very High Cost Impact to the EC/EB community.

• The PKI community lacks metrics for mapping of trust models between the DoD :”high assurance” C2 and EC/EB domains

• Education of everyone (policy maker through user) to a common level of understanding is a huge challenge.

• While the purpose of using PKI in EC/EB is to provide additional trust to allow the Internet to serve as a vehicle for legally binding transactions , problems still exist with the methodologies associated with establishing a long-term burden of proof. Specifically, there are no widely adopted industry standards for maintenance of electronic signatures or for authenticated timestamps for record maintenance that have stood the test of time. These processes are untried and the case law has not yet been established to convince users that there are no issues with enforcement of these new processes. An additional barrier to EC/EB within this space is the current DoD Certificate policy in which DoD accepts

Dissemination

Random Ramblings on Reputation Management and Distribution

This system has unique distribution requirements as compared to most distributed systems in general. In this system, we cannot assume that there will be a universally agreed-upon definition of good, or bad. Similarly, the system must be self-policing. It would be up to each and every group of autonomous systems to decide which updates to accept and reject. Updates themselves also should not cause the network to DDoS itself. Lastly, it would be impossible for every system to know what the reputation for a given system is. Therefore the system must disseminate information in some way that is query-able and localizes reputation information where required.

To this end, we need a way of spreading information that while reliable, does not depend on one universally agreed-upon set of reputations.

For example, on an internet-scale operating system it would be entirely reasonable for one group of systems to not want to accept updates, or want to avoid communication with a given series of systems.

Any solution would assume that the problems of attribution are solved.

Current Examples of Reputation Dissemination

The first protocol that immediately comes to mind in this situation is a gossip-based protocol. These protocols are designed to operate in highly decentralized, large-scale systems.

Here's a nice overview:

• http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.proxy.library.carleton.ca/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4537308 "Reputation management in distributed systems"

Examples are as follows:

• http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.proxy.library.carleton.ca/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4228013 "Gossip-based Reputation Aggregation for Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Networks"
• http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.proxy.library.carleton.ca/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5569965 "Improving Accuracy and Coverage in an Internet-Deployed Reputation Mechanism"
• http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.proxy.library.carleton.ca/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4459326 "GossipTrust for Fast Reputation Aggregation in Peer-to-Peer Networks"
• http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.proxy.library.carleton.ca/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4777496 "Adaptive trust management in P2P networks using gossip protocol"

Another possibility is using "Reputation chains"

• http://dx.doi.org.proxy.library.carleton.ca/10.1109/TKDE.2009.45 "P2P Reputation Management Using Distributed Identities and Decentralized Recommendation Chains"

Maintaining History

Reputation systems

• record, aggregate, distribute information about an entity's behaviour in distributed applications

• reputation might be based on the entity's past ability to adhere to a license agreement (mutual contract between issuer and licensee)

History-based access control systems

• make decision based on an entity's past security-sensitive actions

Examples of reputation systems (trust-informing technologies)

• eBay - Feedback forum (positive, neutral, negative)

Do reputation systems have some validity?

Resnick et al. argue that reputation systems foster an incentive for principals to well-behave because of “the expectation of reciprocity or retaliation in future interactions

Abstractions are used to model the aggregated information of each entity. These abstractions may not encompass the full details of transactions and provide context to specific issues relating to feedback. In turn we can end up with ambiguous values.

So we need a system that provides sufficient information in order to verify the precise properties of a past behaviour.

• Krukow, K. A Logical Framework for Reputation Systems and History-based Access Control. School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton, UK. (March 3, 2011) [1]

• Khosrow-Pour, M. Emerging trends and challenges in information technology management (March 7, 2011) [2]

Querying Reputation

Since this won't be the actual page the paper is written on, I'm going to dump possibly relevant links here. If they actually get used I'll make them into proper references.

http://www.kirkarts.com/wiki/images/1/13/Resnick_eBay.pdf - Trust Among Strangers in Internet Transactions: Empirical Analysis of eBay’s Reputation System (maybe not too relevant)

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=544741.544809 - An Evidential Model of Distributed Reputation Management

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=775152.775242&type=series%EF%BF%BD%C3%9C -- The EigenTrust Algorithm for Reputation Management in P2P Networks

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.4.2297&rep=rep1&type=pdf -- A Robust Reputation System for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.125.8729&rep=rep1&type=pdf -- EigenRep: Reputation Management in P2P Networks

http://www.chennaisunday.com/ieee%202010/Reputation%20Estimation%20and%20Query%20in%20Peer-to-Peer%20Networks.pdf -- Reputation Estimation and Query in Peer-to-Peer Networks

Here is another paper that might be interesting for you. -- Lester http://dcg.ethz.ch/publications/netecon06.pdf

References

• Joel Weise : "Public Key Infrastructure Overview " http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0801/publickey.pdf Accessed 2nd March 2011

• Security Glossary : http://www.cafesoft.com/support/security-glossary.html Accessed on 2nd March 2011

• Mattila, Anssi; and Mattila, Minna "What is the Effect of Product Attributes on Public-Key Infrastructure adoption? " http://internetjournals.net/journals/tir/2006/January/Paper%2003.pdf Accessed on 2nd March 2011

• Electronic Commerece Conference , PKI Sub-Group , Issue Paper : http://www.defense.gov/dodreform/ecwg/pki.pdf date accessed 5th March 2011