Today, reputation systems such as ebay’s prominent “Feedback Forum” are becoming more widespread. In such a system, reputations
are formed by aggregating ratings participants give and receive. These reputations, however, are bound to a specific platform
preventing participants from taking and showing their hard-earned reputations elsewhere. That makes the reputations less valuable
and leaves them vulnerable to manipulation and total loss. In this paper, we propose a viable solution to these issues in
which current P2P and PKI technologies are employed to shift ownership and responsibility back to the participants. Our envisioned
Reputation Management System, therefore, uses contextdependent feedback gathered in questionnaires and provides security for
peer transactions to ensure integrity, confidentiality and privacy.
This research was made possible, in part, by the kind support of the project unit eSolutions, T-Systems GEI GmbH, Germany.
We are especially grateful to Everett Wilson for his support and constructive comments on this paper.