P3ERS: Privacy-Preserving PEer Review System

Even though they integrate some blind submission functionalities, current conference review systems, such as EasyChair and EDAS, do not fully protect the privacy of authors and reviewers, in particular from the eyes of the program chair. As a consequence, their use may cause a lack of objectivity in the decision process. In~this paper, we address this issue by proposing P3ERS (for Privacy-Preserving PEer Review System), a distributed conference review system based on group signatures, which aims at preserving the privacy of all participants involved in the peer review process. For~this purpose, we have improved on a generic group signature scheme with revocation features and implemented it in order to ensure the anonymity of the submission and the reviewing phases. We argue that P3ERS could contribute to increase objectivity during the conference review process while maintaining privacy of the various participants.