Securing a cloud-based community trust store for local P2P E-Commerce

Peer-to-peer(P2P) trading applications have much lower costs than conventional client-server systems because they avoid the use of third party service providers. However, a P2P trading application has to be secure and equitable to the peers involved in transactions. This cannot be achieved without the use of some kind of reliable security service provider of trust data. We discuss using a community trust store to host trust related information to support a community based P2P local trading application. It is managed collectively by the peers and is hosted in cloud storage. Community trust stores provide trust data and community assurance to the peers. The trust store only supports mutual authentication, community voting and reputation services. The P2P messaging systems supports all other forms of communication and interaction.