Anonymous Reputation System for IIoT-Enabled Retail Marketing Atop PoS Blockchain

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is revolutionizing the retail industry for manufacturers, suppliers, and retailers to improve operational efficiency and consumer experience. In IIoT-enabled retail marketing, reputation systems play a critical role to boost mutual trust among industrial entities and build consumer confidence. In this paper, we focus on reputation management in the consumer-retailer channel, where retailers can accumulate reputations from consumer feedbacks. To encourage consumers to post feedbacks without worrying about being tracked or retaliated, we propose an anonymous reputation system that preserves consumer identities and individual review confidentialities. To increase system transparency and reliability, we further exploit the tamper-proof nature and the distributed consensus mechanism of the blockchain technology. With system designs based on various cryptographic primitives and a Proof-of-Stake consensus protocol, our blockchain-based reputation system is more efficient to offer high levels of privacy guarantees compared with existing ones. Finally, we explore the implementation challenges of the blockchain-based architecture and present a proof-of-concept prototype system by Parity Ethereum. We measure the on/off-chain performance with the scalability discussion to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system.