Transactional Security for a Distributed Reputation Management System

Today, reputation systems such as ebay’s prominent ”Feedback Forum” are becoming more widespread. In such a system, reputations are formed by aggregating ratings participants give and receive. These reputations, however, are bound to a specific platform preventing participants from taking and showing their hard-earned reputations elsewhere. That makes the reputations less valuable and leaves them vulnerable to manipulation and total loss. In this paper, we propose a viable solution to these issues in which current P2P and PKI technologies are employed to shift ownership and responsibility back to the participants. Our envisioned Reputation Management System, therefore, uses contextdependent feedback gathered in questionnaires and provides security for peer transactions to ensure integrity, confidentiality and privacy.