Street Rep: A Privacy-Preserving Reputation Aggregation System

Christophe Hauser, Shirin Nilizadeh, Yan Shoshitaishvili, Ni Trieu, Srivatsan Ravi, Christopher Kruegel, Giovanni Vigna

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Over the last decade, online reputation has become a central aspect of our digital lives. Most online services and communities assign a reputation score to users, based on feedback from other users about various criteria such as how reliable, helpful, or knowledgeable a person is. While many online services compute reputation based on the same set of such criteria, users currently do not have the ability to use their reputation scores across services. As a result, users face trouble establishing themselves on new services or trusting each other on services that do not support reputation tracking. Existing systems that aggregate reputation scores, unfortunately, provide no guarantee in terms of user privacy, and their use makes user accounts linkable. Such a lack of privacy may result in embarrassment, or worse, place users in danger. In this paper, we present Street Rep, a practical system for aggregating user reputation scores in a privacy-preserving manner. Street Rep makes it possible for users to provide their aggregated scores over multiple services without revealing their respective identities on each service. We discuss our novel approach for tamper-proof privacy preserving score aggregation from multiple sources by combining existing techniques such as blind signatures, homomorphic signatures and private information retrieval. We discuss its practicality and resiliency against different types of attacks. We also built a prototype implementation of Street Rep. Our evaluation demonstrates that Street Rep (a) performs efficiently and (b) practically scales to a large user base.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationSecurity and Privacy in Communication Networks - 19th EAI International Conference, SecureComm 2023, Proceedings
EditorsHaixin Duan, Mourad Debbabi, Xavier de Carné de Carnavalet, Xiapu Luo, Man Ho Allen Au, Xiaojiang Du
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages345-368
Number of pages24
ISBN (Print)9783031649530
DOIs
StatePublished - 2025
Event19th EAI International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks, SecureComm 2023 - Hong Kong, China
Duration: Oct 19 2023Oct 21 2023

Publication series

NameLecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, LNICST
Volume568 LNICST
ISSN (Print)1867-8211
ISSN (Electronic)1867-822X

Conference

Conference19th EAI International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks, SecureComm 2023
Country/TerritoryChina
CityHong Kong
Period10/19/2310/21/23

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications

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