Truth: A Blockchain-Aided Secure Reputation System With Genuine Feedbacks

Abstract

E-commerce has changed the way of shopping and played an important role in the world. Therefore, e-commerce platforms require a secure reputation service, which provides genuine reputation of sellers so as to support potential buyers making the right decision while interacting with an e-commerce platform. Unfortunately, most current e-commerce platforms failed to do so because they fully control the reputation service, which make it easy for an adversary to violate the genuineness of the reputation. In this article, we focus on feedback anonymity and authenticity, which are two critical security properties to ensure a genuine reputation of sellers. We present Truth, a blockchain-aided secure reputation system to remove the trustworthiness of the e-commerce platform while ensuring the two security properties. To overcome the usability and security barriers of blockchain systems, Truth adopts a hybrid framework to rely on the centralized e-commerce platform to provide traditional trading services while the blockchain is only used to authenticate the correctness of feedbacks. To decouple the blockchain from the e-commerce platform, we anchor correctness of feedbacks to correctness of cryptographic tokens and leverage the blockchain to solely escrow the tokens. The Truth also proposes a new concept named purchasing endorsed feedback, which is enforced via a collaborative method to prevent injection of fake feedbacks. We have implemented a prototype to demonstrate that the Truth incurs second-level computation overhead and KB-level communication overhead, and achieves hundreds TPS-level thoughts.