Privacy Preserving Reputation Inquiry in a Peer-to-Peer Communication Environment

This research presents a privacy preserving peer-to-peer communication mechanism that allows peers to obtain reputation information of each other through a trustworthy mediator proxy. A mediator proxy is considered trustworthy, if even when it is compromised, it can guarantee three conditions: (1) the anonymity of the identity of the responders and the target being inquired, (2) the privacy of the content in an inquiry and a response, and (3) the boundary limit of the reputation summary with no possibility of combining the response of multiple inquiries to reverse engineer the reputation rating of an individual responder.