On Trust, Blockchain, and Reputation Systems

Abstract

Trust management in distributed systems has always been a topic of active interest in the research community to understand how to foster and manage aspects. In this sense, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) and, among them, Blockchains (BC), emerge as an alternative for shifting trust assumptions between users to the protocol that regulates the interaction, fostering trust in distributed systems. Especially reputation management systems have enabled several applications to be revisited as an application running based on an underlying distributed system. Thus, a clear understanding of major properties, threats and vulnerabilities, and challenges of reputation systems based on different types of DLT and BC (i.e., permissioned and permissionless) are key to determine their usefulness and optimization potentials. In this sense, a use case of a BC-based reputation system within the context of cooperative network defenses illustrates such benefits and drawbacks of exploiting DLTs for reputation systems.