A reputation system supporting unlinkable, yet authorized expert ratings

ABSTRACT

Reputation systems used in practice typically either provide robustness or anonymity. A lot of research has been going on to come up with schemes that provide both properties, however most of them being too impractical. We come up with an approach for a reputation system that provides anonymity for users, meaning that ratings cannot be linked to raters, but at the same time a rater's identity can be disclosed in case a service is rated twice by a user---having the permission to perform only a single rating. This is achieved by making use of a group signature variant, whose properties are described in detail as well. Moreover, we aim to make our system "lively" by introducing the concept of expert raters, which shall constitute an incentive for users to actively participate in the reputation system by providing ratings. We believe that this functionality is an important one towards practicability.

References

1. Masayuki Abe and Eiichiro Fujisaki. How to date blind signatures. In Kwangjo Kim and Tsutomu Matsumoto, editors, Advances in Cryptology (ASIACRYPT '96), volume 1163 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 244--251. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 1996.
2. Elli Androulaki, Seung Geol Choi, Steven M. Bellovin, and Tal Malkin. Reputation systems for anonymous networks. In Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, PETS '08, pages 202--218, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2008. Springer-Verlag.
3. Dan Boneh and Hovav Shacham. Group signatures with verifier-local revocation. In Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS '04, pages 168--177, New York, NY, USA, 2004. ACM.
4. Stefan Brands. Untraceable off-line cash in wallets with observers (extended abstract). In Proceedings of the 13th Annual International Cryptology Conference on Advances in Cryptology, CRYPTO '93, pages 302--318, London, UK, UK, 1994. Springer-Verlag.
5. David Chaum, Amos Fiat, and Moni Naor. Untraceable electronic cash. In Shafi Goldwasser, editor, Advances in Cryptology (Crypto '88), volume 403 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 319--327. Springer New York, 1990.
6. David Chaum and Eugéne van Heyst. Group signatures. In Donald W. Davies, editor, Advances in Cryptology (EUROCRYPT '91), volume 547 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 257--265. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 1991.
7. H. Chien, J. Jan, and Y. Tseng. RSA-based partially blind signature with low computation. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems, ICPADS '01, pages 385--, Washington, DC, USA, 2001. IEEE Computer Society.
8. Ivan Damgård, Kasper Dupont, and Michael Østergaard Pedersen. Unclonable group identification. In Serge Vaudenay, editor, Advances in Cryptology - EUROCRYPT 2006, volume 4004 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 555--572. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2006.
9. Uriel Feige, Amos Fiat, and Adi Shamir. Zero-knowledge proofs of identity. Journal of Cryptology, 1(2):77--94, 1988.
10. Eiichiro Fujisaki and Koutarou Suzuki. Traceable ring signature. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Practice and Theory in Public-key Cryptography, PKC'07, pages 181--200, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2007. Springer-Verlag.
11. Kevin Hoffman, David Zage, and Cristina Nita-Rotaru. A survey of attack and defense techniques for reputation systems. ACM Comput. Surv., 42(1):1:1--1:31, December 2009.
12. Alexander Jungmann, Sonja Brangewitz, Ronald Petrlic, and Marie Christin Platenius. Incorporating reputation information into decision-making processes for markets of composed services. International Journal On Advances in Intelligent Systems, 7(4), 2014.
13. Florian Kerschbaum. A verifiable, centralized, coercion-free reputation system. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society, WPES '09, pages 61--70, New York, NY, USA, 2009. ACM.
14. Ronald Petrlic, Sascha Lutters, and Christoph Sorge. Privacy-preserving reputation management. In Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC 2014, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea - March 24-28, 2014, pages 1712--1718, 2014.
15. Stefan Schiffner, Sebastian Clauß, and Sandra Steinbrecher. Privacy, liveliness and fairness for reputation. In Proceedings of the 37th international conference on Current trends in theory and practice of computer science, SOFSEM'11, pages 506--519, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011. Springer-Verlag.

Index Terms

• Security and privacy

  • Cryptography

    • Cryptanalysis and other attacks

  • Human and societal aspects of security and privacy

  • Intrusion/anomaly detection and malware mitigation

  • Security services

    • Authentication

• Social and professional topics

  • Computing / technology policy

    • Computer crime

    • Privacy policies