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Handbook on Blockchain pp 299–337Cite as

On Trust, Blockchain, and Reputation Systems

Part of the Springer Optimization and Its Applications book series (SOIA,volume 194)

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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Trust “remains” to exist from BC participants in all underlying cryptographic means and mechanisms, since otherwise, manipulations would become possible and not detectable. Thus, “trustless” refers typically to participants themselves, who do not need to trust anyone else (cf. below).

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Acknowledgements

This paper was supported partially by (a) the University of Zürich UZH, Switzerland and (b) the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program under Grant Agreement No. 830927, the CONCORDIA project.

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  1. Communication Systems Group CSG, Department of Informatics IfI, University of Zürich UZH Binzmühlestrasse 14, CH—8050, Zürich, Switzerland

    Bruno Rodrigues, Muriel Franco, Christian Killer, Eder J. Scheid & Burkhard Stiller

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  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA

    Duc A. Tran

  2. Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    My T. Thai

  3. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Bhaskar Krishnamachari

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Rodrigues, B., Franco, M., Killer, C., Scheid, E.J., Stiller, B. (2022). On Trust, Blockchain, and Reputation Systems. In: Tran, D.A., Thai, M.T., Krishnamachari, B. (eds) Handbook on Blockchain. Springer Optimization and Its Applications, vol 194. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07535-3_9

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