ARS-Chain: A Blockchain-Based Anonymous Reputation-Sharing Framework for E-Commerce Platforms

Abstract

E-commerce platforms incorporate reputation systems that allow buyers to rate sellers after transactions. However, existing reputation systems face challenges such as privacy leakage, linkability, and multiple rating attacks. The feedback data can inadvertently expose user information privacy because they reveal the buyers’ identities and preferences, which deters a significant number of users from providing their ratings. Moreover, malicious actors can exploit data analysis and machine learning techniques to mine user privacy from the rating data, posing serious threats to user security and trust. This study introduces ARS-Chain, a pioneering and secure blockchain-driven anonymous reputation-sharing framework tailored for e-commerce platforms. The core of ARS-Chain is a dynamic ring addition mechanism with linkable ring signatures (LRS), where the number of LRS rings is dynamically added in alignment with the evolving purchase list, and LRS link tags are constructed with the LRS rings and item identifiers. Further, a consortium blockchain is introduced to store these anonymous ratings on e-commerce platforms. As a result, ARS-Chain ensures full anonymity while achieving cross-platform reputation sharing, making rating records unlinkable, and effectively countering multiple rating attacks. The experimental results confirm that ARS-Chain significantly enhances user information privacy protection while maintaining system performance, having an important impact on the construction of trust mechanisms for e-commerce platforms.