Logo
ScienceStack
Table of Contents
Fetching ...
Sign In

TrustRate: A Decentralized Platform for Hijack-Resistant Anonymous Reviews

Rohit Dwivedula, Sriram Sridhar, Sambhav Satija, Muthian Sivathanu, Nishanth Chandran, Divya Gupta, Satya Lokam

TL;DR

TrustRate presents a decentralized, hijack-resistant, anonymous platform for authentic user reviews built on Blockene, URS-based voting, and blind signatures. By introducing dynamic randomized access control and carefully batching transactions, the system increases hijack cost while preserving user anonymity. The authors implement a full prototype at scale (thousands of nodes) and show substantial throughput improvements via offloading and batching, with detailed performance and cost analyses for both permissioned and permissionless settings. This work demonstrates a practical path toward tamper-proof, end-user-controlled reviews suitable for public aggregators and enterprise polls, impacting how trust is built into online rankings and surveys.

Abstract

Reviews and ratings by users form a central component in several widely used products today (e.g., product reviews, ratings of online content, etc.), but today's platforms for managing such reviews are ad-hoc and vulnerable to various forms of tampering and hijack by fake reviews either by bots or motivated paid workers. We define a new metric called 'hijack-resistance' for such review platforms, and then present TrustRate, an end-to-end decentralized, hijack-resistant platform for authentic, anonymous, tamper-proof reviews. With a prototype implementation and evaluation at the scale of thousands of nodes, we demonstrate the efficacy and performance of our platform, towards a new paradigm for building products based on trusted reviews by end users without having to trust a single organization that manages the reviews.

TrustRate: A Decentralized Platform for Hijack-Resistant Anonymous Reviews

TL;DR

TrustRate presents a decentralized, hijack-resistant, anonymous platform for authentic user reviews built on Blockene, URS-based voting, and blind signatures. By introducing dynamic randomized access control and carefully batching transactions, the system increases hijack cost while preserving user anonymity. The authors implement a full prototype at scale (thousands of nodes) and show substantial throughput improvements via offloading and batching, with detailed performance and cost analyses for both permissioned and permissionless settings. This work demonstrates a practical path toward tamper-proof, end-user-controlled reviews suitable for public aggregators and enterprise polls, impacting how trust is built into online rankings and surveys.

Abstract

Reviews and ratings by users form a central component in several widely used products today (e.g., product reviews, ratings of online content, etc.), but today's platforms for managing such reviews are ad-hoc and vulnerable to various forms of tampering and hijack by fake reviews either by bots or motivated paid workers. We define a new metric called 'hijack-resistance' for such review platforms, and then present TrustRate, an end-to-end decentralized, hijack-resistant platform for authentic, anonymous, tamper-proof reviews. With a prototype implementation and evaluation at the scale of thousands of nodes, we demonstrate the efficacy and performance of our platform, towards a new paradigm for building products based on trusted reviews by end users without having to trust a single organization that manages the reviews.
Paper Structure (82 sections, 14 theorems, 7 equations, 2 figures, 12 tables)

This paper contains 82 sections, 14 theorems, 7 equations, 2 figures, 12 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Properties of TrustRate
  3. TrustRate architecture
  4. Generality of TrustRate
  5. Polling System: Definition and Notation
  6. Defining the review/polling system
  7. Properties of polling system
  8. Decentralized
  9. Hijack Resistance
  10. Anonymity
  11. Fairness
  12. Building Blocks
  13. Blockene
  14. Safe Sample
  15. Politicians and Blacklisting
  16. ...and 67 more sections

Key Result

Lemma 4.1

Let $0< \rho$ρ$, \theta$θ$, \epsilon < 1$ be constants as defined in §sec:def-pollng-system-properties and let $\gamma$ be used to denote hijack cost as defined in Defn defn:hijack_cost. Assuming that every honest user selected to take part in a poll does participate, TrustRate is a review system wi where $g(\alpha, \beta) = \frac{-3\ln \beta + \sqrt{(\ln \beta)^2 - 8\alpha \ln \beta}}{2\alpha + 2

Figures (2)

  • Figure 1: Overview of the blind signature protocol. Once the user unblinds the message received from the admin, they can send it to third parties as proof of membership.
  • Figure 2: Proof of equality of discrete logarithms

Theorems & Definitions (18)

  • Definition 2.1: Hijacking cost
  • Definition 2.2
  • Definition 2.3
  • Definition 2.4
  • Lemma 4.1
  • Theorem 4.1
  • Lemma F.1
  • Lemma F.2
  • Lemma F.3: Fairness of RANDOM_GROUP
  • Lemma F.4: Fairness of OLDEST
  • ...and 8 more