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A Privacy-Preserving Attribute-Based Reputation System in Online Social Networks

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Abstract

Online social networks (OSNs) have revolutionarily changed the way people connect with each other. One of the main factors that help achieve this success is reputation systems that enable OSN users to mutually establish trust relationships based on their past experience. Current approaches for the reputation management cannot achieve the fine granularity and verifiability for each individual user, in the sense that the reputation values on such OSNs are coarse and lack of credibility. In this paper, we propose a fine granularity attribute-based reputation system which enables users to rate each other’s attributes instead of identities. Our scheme first verifies each OSN user’s attributes, and further allows OSN users to vote on the posted attribute-associated messages to derive the reputation value. The attribute verification process provides the authenticity of the reputation value without revealing the actual value to entities who do not have the vote privilege. To predict a stranger’s behavior, we propose a reputation retrieval protocol for querying the reputation value on a specific attribute. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to define a fine-grained reputation value based on users’ verified attributes in OSNs with privacy preservation. We provide the security analysis along with the simulation results to verify the privacy preservation and feasibility. The implementation of the proposed scheme on current OSNs is also discussed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY, 13902, U.S.A.

    Linke Guo

  2. CAS Key Laboratory of Electromagnetic Space Information, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Chi Zhang

  3. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 32611, U.S.A.

    Yuguang Fang

  4. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, “National” Taiwan University, Taipei, 10617, China

    Phone Lin

Authors
  1. Linke Guo
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  2. Chi Zhang
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  3. Yuguang Fang
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  4. Phone Lin
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yuguang Fang.

Additional information

This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation of USA under Grant No. CNS-1423165. The work of Chi was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant Nos. 61202140 and 61328208, the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University of China under Grant No. NCET-13-0548, and the Innovation Foundation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences under Grant No. CXJJ-14-S132. Lin’s work was supported in part by MoE ATU Plan, the Taiwan Science and Technology Authority under Grant Nos. MOST 103-2622-E-009-012, MOST 103-2221-E-002-152-MY3, MOST 103-2221-E-002-249-MY3, MOST 104-2923-E-002-005-MY3, and MOST 103-2627-E-002-008, and the ICL/ITRI Project of Chunghwa Telecom.

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Guo, L., Zhang, C., Fang, Y. et al. A Privacy-Preserving Attribute-Based Reputation System in Online Social Networks. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 30, 578–597 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-015-1547-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-015-1547-9

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