Anonymous and Publicly Linkable Reputation Systems (Short Paper)

We consider reputation systems where users are allowed to rate products that they purchased previously. To obtain trustworthy reputations, they are allowed to rate these products only once. As long as they do so, the users stay anonymous. Everybody is able to detect users deviating from the rate-products-only-once policy and the anonymity of such dishonest users can be revoked by a system manager. In this paper we present formal models for such reputation systems and their security. Based on group signatures we design an efficient reputation system that meets all our requirements.