Blockchain-Based Reputation Systems: Implementation Challenges and Mitigation

Reputation expresses the beliefs or opinions about someone or something that are held by an individual or by a community. Reputation Management Systems (RMSs) handle representation, computation, and storage of reputation in some quantitative form, suitable for grounding trust relations among parties. Quantifying reputation is important in situations, like online service provision, which involve interaction between parties who do not know (and potentially distrust) each other. The basic idea is to let parties rate each other. When a party is considered for interaction, its ratings can be aggregated in order to derive a score for deciding whether to trust it or not. While much valuable research work has been done on reputation-based trust schemes, the problem of establishing collective trust in the reputation management system itself has never been fully solved. Recently, several researchers have put forward the idea of using Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) as the foundation for implementing trustworthy RMSs. The purpose of this paper is to identify some critical problems that arise when DLTs are used in order to manage evidence about previous interaction and compute reputations. The paper proposes some practical solutions and describes methods to deploy them on top of standard DLT of the Ethereum family.