Reputation Systems for Supply Chains: The Challenge of Achieving Privacy Preservation

Consumers frequently interact with reputation systems to rate products, services, and deliveries. While past research extensively studied different conceptual approaches to realize such systems securely and privacy-preservingly, these concepts are not yet in use in business-to-business environments. In this paper, (1) we thus outline which specific challenges privacy-cautious stakeholders in volatile supply chain networks introduce, (2) give an overview of the diverse landscape of privacy-preserving reputation systems and their properties, and (3) based on well-established concepts from supply chain information systems and cryptography, we further propose an initial concept that accounts for the aforementioned challenges by utilizing fully homomorphic encryption. For future work, we identify the need of evaluating whether novel systems address the supply chain-specific privacy and confidentiality needs.