A Survey of attacks on Reputation Systems

Reputation systems provide mechanisms through which multiple parties can quantify the trust between one another. These systems seek to generate an accurate assessment in the face of unprecedented community size, while providing anonymity and resilience to malicious attacks. We focus on attacks and defense mechanisms in reputation systems. We present an analysis framework that allows for general decomposition of existing reputation systems. We classify attacks against reputation systems by identifying which system components and design choices are the target of attacks. We survey defense mechanisms employed by existing reputation systems. Finally, we analyze several landmark systems, characterizing their individual strengths and weaknesses. Our work contributes to understanding 1) which design components of reputation systems are most vulnerable, 2) what are the most appropriate defense mechanisms and 3) how these defense mechanisms can be integrated into existing or future reputation systems to make them resilient to attacks. General Terms: (1) Design; (2) Reliability; (3) Security; (4) Theory