Privacy-preserving reputation management in fully decentralized systems: challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Reputation is one of crucial personal information strongly attached to each person, so it affects directly to its owner in whatever way it is used. Any form of reputation violation can carry a serious consequence to its owner. Therefore, reputation needs to be managed in a secure way. Moreover, reputation management is a substantial process as it plays a key role in building up a certain trust level, among just-met users. Thus just-met users can base on reputation scores to make a decision on starting up their communication. In addition, reputation management reduces risks of leaking user privacy and losing data security. So far, several works on managing reputation in online social network have been studied, mostly using the Internet for data transmission. In this work, reputation management is placed into the context of fully decentralized environment. Under the more harsh conditions which the decentralized mobile environment carries, such as no central node, frequently changed user location, and restrictions of energy, power, memory, etc., and the security requirement, methods of reputation management get more challenged. Various security problems of managing reputation are still open to be solved. In this work, we make a discussion about recent works on privacy-preserving reputation management in a decentralized environment. We then present challenges, and conclude the open problems as well as possible solutions in reputation management.