RevBloc: A Blockchain-based Secure Customer Review System

Customer reviews enable customers to share their experiences with others, which allow potential customers to know more about products and consume products with confidence. However, online product sellers and service providers could manipulate customer reviews, such as adding fake positive reviews and removing negative customer reviews, to support their business. Manipulated reviews could result in distorting the original content of customer reviews and misleading customers. State-of-the-art solutions lack a customer review system that is secure, efficient, and usable. In this paper, we propose RevBloc to provide a customer review system with a high level of security, efficiency, and usability. RevBloc is based on blockchain technology that enables customer reviews to be preserved in a distributed ledger, thus a single or subset of malicious parties cannot manipulate the reviews. To show the feasibility of our approach, we implement a proof-of-concept prototype of RevBloc and report its performance.