PRSONA: Private Reputation Supporting Ongoing Network Avatars

As an increasing amount of social activity moves online, online communities have become important outlets for their members to interact and communicate with one another. At times, these communities may identify opportunities where providing their members specific privacy guarantees would promote new opportunities for healthy social interaction and assure members that their participation can be conducted safely. On the other hand, communities also face the threat of bad actors, who may wish to disrupt their activities or bring harm to members. Reputation can help mitigate the threat of such bad actors, and there has been a wide body of work on privacy-preserving reputation systems. However, previous work has overlooked the needs of small, tight-knit communities, failing to provide important privacy guarantees or address shortcomings with common implementations of reputation. This work features a novel design for a privacy-preserving reputation system which provides these privacy guarantees and implements a more appropriate reputation function for this setting. Further, this work implements and benchmarks said system to determine its viability in real-world deployment. This novel construction addresses shortcomings with previous approaches and provides new opportunity to its target audience.