Securing P2P networks using peer reputations: Is there a silver bullet?

Peer reputations have been used as security tools to not only motivate peers against cheating but also protect good peers from the chronic cheaters. Although the reputation management techniques are not confined to P2P networks, they present novel challenges that were absent in central server based distributed systems. We enumerate these challenges and survey the solutions proposed by the community to counter them. These challenges include, but are not limited to, peer-identification in decentralized environments, reputation metrics, storage and exchange of reputation data. Finally we survey the applications which use P2P network paradigm and therefore can benefit from the reputation systems.