Overview
Peer-to-peer systems available today (like Gnutella) are open, often anonymous and lack accountability. Hence a user with malicious intent can introduce into the peer-to-peer network resources that may be inauthentic, corrupted or malicious (Virus). This reflects poorly on the credibility of current peer-to-peer systems. A research team from Stanford provides a reputation management system, where each peer in the system has a unique global trust value based on the peer's history of uploads. Any peer requesting resources will be able to access the trust value of a peer and avoid downloading files from untrusted peers.
Read more about this topic: Eigen Trust