A reputation system supporting unlinkable, yet authorized expert ratings

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. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.6.5 [Management of Computing and Information S...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: SAC
• Authors: Andreas Kokoschka, Ronald Petrlic, Christoph Sorge
• Keywords: Applied Computing, SAC 2015