Paper 2014/546

Anonymous and Publicly Linkable Reputation Systems

Johannes Blömer and Jakob Juhnke and Christina Kolb

Abstract

Reputation systems are used to compute and publish reputation scores for services or products. We consider reputation systems where users are allowed to rate products that they purchased previously. To obtain trustworthy reputations, they are allowed to rate these products only once. As long as users rate products once, they stay anonymous. Everybody is able to detect users deviating from the rate-products-only-once policy and the anonymity of such dishonest users can be revoked by a system manager. In this paper we present formal models for such reputation systems and their security. Based on group signatures presented by Boneh, Boyen, and Shacham we design an efficient reputation system that meets all our requirements.