Muppet: Managing Privacy and Trust in P2P Communication

Peer-to-Peer technologies can offer radically new possibilities for communication, be it broadcast, group or person-to-person communication. At the same time, the distributed nature of this technology presents us with many trust and privacy challenges especially in the mobile environment.

In 2004 we looked at game-theory-based incentives of trustworthy behaviour, collected an extensive state-of-the-art report on existing reputation mechanisms, synthesized an initial reputation management engine that can work in a peer-to-peer fashion, and built a simple demonstration for Nokia Series 60 phones based on the findings. The demonstration focused on a simple e-market application.

In 2005 the work continued by extending the research into the mechanism of multiple contexts and beginning to work with real P2P technology. To accomplish this, the project started cooperation with DiMaS as well as Dr Johan Pouwelse from TUDelft. It published papers of the reputation mechanism and privacy evaluations of distributed reputation.

In 2006 the project will conclude in developing a demonstration on the DiMaS platform. The reputation mechanism will be extended to be aware of the involved social network. Possibilities for access control for reputation data will also be studied.

People

• Martti Mäntylä, project leader
• Juho Heikkilä
• Yki Kortesniemi
• Katri Sarkio
• Markku Stenborg

Research groups

• Digital Economy Professor Jukka Kemppinen, Dr Pekka Nikander, Dr Pekka Himanen, Dr Markku Stenborg, Professor Martti Mäntylä

See www-old.hiit.fi/muppet/ for further information and publications.