p2pnet - rss feed: Credence anti-spoof app
p2pnet.net News:- Credence is becoming increasingly credible.
In March we ran an item on a new Cornell University project custom-designed to stymie individuals and entities who post e-garbage.
“Organizations such as the RIAA and music labels regularly pollute these networks with nonsense files masquerading as real music/video files,” says yeejiun on slashdot. “These junk files make it difficult for users to find what they want on such p2p networks.”
Enter Credence which allows users to vote on whether files are for real, or just e-junk being spread by the cartels or others.
It’s been implemented on top of the LimeWire client to provide a, “peer-based judgement that a given object will possess the properties with which it is labeled and enables users to evaluate search results for authenticity before downloading,” say the creators.
“Many peer-to-peer reputation schemes have been proposed in academia. Credence is the first practical implementation of a peer-to-peer reputation scheme. As future systems become more connected and endpoints become more reliant on content provided by other nodes, reputation systems like Credence can play an important role in assessing the validity of remote content.”
There have been several new developments since our first post, among them Network Status (live data about the Credence network), a section on LimeWire vulnerabilities the Cornell crew turned up while they were implementing Credence, implementation, binaries and source and a forums area for discussion and help.
Behind Credence are 3rd-year PhD computer science graduate student Kevin Walsh, and principal investigator Emin Gün Sirer, an assistant professor in the computer science dept.
Download Credence here.
Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net
See:-
e-garbage - Stop p2p spammers, p2pnet, March 21, 2005
slashdot - Reputation System Fights P2P Junk, August 4, 2005
Credence - THWARTING P2P POLLUTION
LimeWire vulnerabilities - LimeWire 4.8 release, p2pnet, March 14, 2005
August 6th, 2005 at 6:21 pm
This is nothing new………..Shareaza has had this feature for years.
August 6th, 2005 at 10:23 pm
And can’t they artificially boost the the rating?
August 6th, 2005 at 11:07 pm
“This is nothing new………..Shareaza has had this feature for years.”
Now if only more people would actually make use of the feature. Sigh. That’s the downfall of systems like these. People are just too lazy, or simply don’t realize they can make a difference in regards to file authenticity.
August 6th, 2005 at 11:45 pm
7. Can a group of spammers game the Credence algorithm by voting thumbs-up for each others’ spam ?
No. The trustworthiness computation is designed to preclude such attacks.
8. What happens when a large number of spammers vote each others’ spam up ? Can they fool the reputation system ?
No. Credence’s reputation computation is similar to Google’s PageRank, but is more general - every node computes a different rank based on its own votes. Reputation flows from a given good node along trust edges towards other nodes. Spammers can create tight cliques in which everyone votes on each others’ spam, but the entire clique will be deemed untrustworthy. And if anyone in the spammer clique does a search, they will see each others’ spam ranked high.
August 7th, 2005 at 5:33 pm
The Credence system is actually quite different from Shareaza since it does not blindly trust any votings. Instead it has a rating system that chooses trusted peers from whom to obtain a file-rating.
Shareaza’s simplistic approach will never be able to combat spam/bad files introduced into the network by a malicious entity such as the RIAA.
August 12th, 2005 at 4:51 pm
It should be included in LimeWire.
People would use it, probably LimeWire developers could make this even easier to use.
You could rate the file up or down and have a selection on why.
Or just say that it’s a fake.
Sometimes I believe people put songs there, that aren’ t corrupted but sound like crap so you buy.
November 15th, 2005 at 9:31 pm
Sigh.. If only people would do a little more research instead of spewing falsehoods across the internet!
A quick googling for ‘Shareaza file rating’ returns the Shareaza FAQ as one of its results.. in said FAQ it reads..
“…the rating column…reflect[s] a user’s opinion of the file, whether it be based on quality or not, it is the user’s choice.”
So in other words it is only that user. So a spammer could still use Shareaza, and then say that their garbage file was a five-star masterpiece. The only word you would have to go on is theirs. Credence is different in that if that one spammer says his file is great and another 10 people who downloaded it say that it sucks, that means it sucks. The opinions in Credence are related to each other.