Decentralized management of online user reviews with immutability using IPFS and Ethereum blockchain

Abstract

As industry 4.0 is more focused on the digital transformation of industries, various industrialists (including both the private and public sectors) want to increase their brand values, in order to reach the maximum number of peoples. To achieve this, most of them using online platforms including social media. Presently, various companies such as Flipkart, Amazon, eBay are selling their goods through the online platform. On the other side, customers are purchasing goods based on the review and rating of the concerned goods. In the current/traditional system, centralized architecture is utilized to store the review and rating given by customers. But, this architecture is subjected to the review tampering and manipulation. Thus, there is an urgent need to fix the above-mentioned problem. The blockchain is one of the revolutionizing technologies in the era of industry 4.0 that provides a trustworthy, transparent, and decentralized system, and capable to fix the issue associated with the current online review system. In this proposal, we provide a solution for it based on the ethereum blockchain, smart contracts, and Interplanetary File System (IPFS). Reviewer’s reviews are stored in the ethereum blockchain which is based on the logic (rules) written in the smart contracts. IPFS is a distributed storage system for storing the reviews, across the nodes of the connected computers based on the IPFS hash addresses. The Overall system functionalities are implemented in the solidity and smart contracts security tool is used to test and vulnerability analysis of the code.