Bobby Bhattacharjee, University of Maryland

NICE:  A Platform for Cooperative Internet Applications

NICE is a platform for implementing cooperative applications over the
Internet.  In this talk we present an overview of NICE, and focus on a
distributed scheme for trust inference in NICE.  Our scheme can be
used to construct cooperative groups and implement peer-to-peer
applications such as media streaming and wide-area lookup services.
We describe a technique for efficiently storing user reputation
information in a completely decentralized manner, and show how this
information can be used to efficiently identify non-cooperative users
in NICE.

We present a simulation-based study of our algorithms in which we
show our scheme scales to thousands of users using modest amounts of
storage, processing, and bandwidth at any individual node.  Lastly, we
show that our scheme is robust and can form cooperative groups in
systems where the vast majority of users are malicious.