Signatures of Reputation: Towards Trust Without Identity

Reputation systems have become an increasingly important tool for highlighting quality information and filtering spam within online forums. However, the dependence of a user’s reputation on their history of activities seems to preclude any possibility of anonymity. We show that useful reputation information can, in fact, coexist with strong privacy guarantees. We introduce and formalize a novel cryptographic primitive we call signatures of reputation which supports monotonic measures of reputation in a completely anonymous setting. In our system, a user can express trust in others by voting for them, collect votes to build up her own reputation, and attach a proof of her reputation to any data she publishes, all while maintaining the unlinkability of her actions.