Rethinking Online Trust
Event details
| Date | 25.06.2025 |
| Hour | 14:00 › 15:00 |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
| Event Language | English |
By Betül Durak
Abstract
This talk will present and discuss how to create (on-line) trust through accountability. In particular, we focus on an on-line communication scenario, where the communicating parties do not know each other, yet would benefit from a degree of initial trust. Our design can be seen as a reputation system that formally measures bad behavior, with strong integrity protections and resistance to manipulation. Unlike most reputation systems, it is entirely based on “down-votes” and therefore requires strong privacy guarantees to prevent retaliation. Using a ticket-based reporting mechanism, we limit who can report. Furthermore, we formally prove that our system incentivizes good behavior in a well-defined sense. In short, the talk will bring together two major results: verifiable anonymous reporting using cryptography and manipulation resilience through game-theoretic principles.
Abstract
This talk will present and discuss how to create (on-line) trust through accountability. In particular, we focus on an on-line communication scenario, where the communicating parties do not know each other, yet would benefit from a degree of initial trust. Our design can be seen as a reputation system that formally measures bad behavior, with strong integrity protections and resistance to manipulation. Unlike most reputation systems, it is entirely based on “down-votes” and therefore requires strong privacy guarantees to prevent retaliation. Using a ticket-based reporting mechanism, we limit who can report. Furthermore, we formally prove that our system incentivizes good behavior in a well-defined sense. In short, the talk will bring together two major results: verifiable anonymous reporting using cryptography and manipulation resilience through game-theoretic principles.
Bio
Betül Durak is a senior researcher in the Security, Privacy, and Cryptography group at Microsoft Research in Redmond. Her work spans diverse areas, from Format-Preserving Encryption for legacy databases to Anonymous Tokens for both secure and privacy-preserving access control. Her recent research focuses on defining and formally analyzing digital trust across various applications. Learn more about her previous work at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/betuldurak/.
More information
Betül Durak is a senior researcher in the Security, Privacy, and Cryptography group at Microsoft Research in Redmond. Her work spans diverse areas, from Format-Preserving Encryption for legacy databases to Anonymous Tokens for both secure and privacy-preserving access control. Her recent research focuses on defining and formally analyzing digital trust across various applications. Learn more about her previous work at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/betuldurak/.
More information
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Contact
- Host: Prof. Serge Vaudenay