A Decentralized Privacy Preserving Reputation Protocol for the Malicious Adversarial Model

Abstract

Users hesitate to submit negative feedback in reputation systems due to the fear of retaliation from the recipient user. A privacy preserving reputation protocol protects users by hiding their individual feedback and revealing only the reputation score. We present a privacy preserving reputation protocol for the malicious adversarial model. The malicious users in this model actively attempt to learn the private feedback values of honest users as well as to disrupt the protocol. Our protocol does not require centralized entities, trusted third parties, or specialized platforms, such as anonymous networks and trusted hardware. Moreover, our protocol is efficient. It requires an exchange of messages, where and are the number of users in the protocol and the environment, respectively.