Level Of Anonymity Research Articles

Are blockchains and cybercurrencies demanding a new legislative framework

The digital economy and especially Blockchain technology are opening interesting new fields for regulating and legislative authorities. Some government representatives make the mistake to look at blockchain applications mainly as underlying technology for cryptocurrency technologies. But the technology can be used far wider as a way for secure decentralized data storage. Storing data on worldwide networks makes the blockchain applications difficult to regulate as they are not residing in a specific area of influence of any given regulation or jurisdiction. Also the blockchain applications offer an extensive level of anonymity to their stakeholders. In future artificial intelligence will start to optimize the applications and trigger decisions automatically which will become a major challenge for competition and anti-trust regulators as it will be difficult to define legal entities with responsibility for the action taken. Beside building up an appropriate regulation regime the inherent challenges in blockchain technologies will ask for a strong self-regulation of the market participants in the digital marketplace.

Social and Pop-media as Reflection of Self

The essay provides an introspection into the relationship between our identities and technology. It aims to show how our identities are affected by new modes of operation that were less accessible before the emergence of social networks. Through an observation of popular media (i.e. TV shows) and social media, it reveals how the self is convoluted, resulting into a variety of performed identities. It explores how through social media, individuals are able to create perceived identities, which are to various degrees lived or completely fabricated. The essay uses iZombie and Orphan Black as case studies to showcase how life and the media are intertwined, resulting in the latter holding a mirror to the former. With a distinction between the online and offline personality, it presents the augmentation of identity with the aid of new interfaces, online intermediaries that add to the interpersonal contact; from the initial landline phone to more current modes of communication (Facebook, Tinder…) the essay points out how levels of anonymity aid the emergence of new identities. It provides a mirror of contemporary life and the ways the augmented self-influences the ways we understand and view our identities. Keywords: context collapse, identity, performing the self, social media, TV shows

A Privacy-Preserving Incentive Mechanism for Participatory Sensing Systems

The proliferation of mobile devices has facilitated the prevalence of participatory sensing applications in which participants collect and share information in their environments. The design of a participatory sensing application confronts two challenges: “privacy” and “incentive” which are two conflicting objectives and deserve deeper attention. Inspired by physical currency circulation system, this paper introduces the notion of E-cent, an exchangeable unit bearer currency. Participants can use the E-cent to take part in tasks anonymously. By employing E-cent, we propose an E-cent-based privacy-preserving incentive mechanism, called EPPI. As a dynamic balance regulatory mechanism, EPPI can not only protect the privacy of participant, but also adjust the whole system to the ideal situation, under which the rated tasks can be finished at minimal cost. To the best of our knowledge, EPPI is the first attempt to build an incentive mechanism while maintaining the desired privacy in participatory sensing systems. Extensive simulation and analysis results show that EPPI can achieve high anonymity level and remarkable incentive effects.

A lightweight authentication and privacy-preserving scheme for VANETs using TESLA and Bloom Filters

Abstract In Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs), broadcasted beacon messages are critical as most safety applications rely on them. However, the design of a secure broadcast authentication faces many security and privacychallenges as vehicles are vulnerable to active attacks and the revealing of location. In this paper, we propose a lightweight authentication scheme using Timed Efficient Stream Loss-Tolerant Authentication (TESLA) scheme and Bloom Filters that not only prevents active attacks but also adds a privacy-preserving feature to make the scheme have better performance. Simulation results indicate the scheme outperforms the existing schemes in terms of verification time and the level of anonymity.

Blockchains and Cybercurrencies Challenging Anti Trust and Competition Law

Blockchain technology has come to most people’s attention through Bitcoin as the leading cryptocurrency today. But the technology can be used for a lot of other applications as a way to store decentralized data and information. Blockchains are filing their records through a continuously growing number of single “blocks” which are linked and secured using cryptography. Typically, such blockchains are managed by a peer-to-peer network using a specified protocol for validating new blocks. By storing data across an international network, this new technology is operating independently of any government or central bank as it is not residing in a specific area of influence of any given regulation or jurisdiction. Also, there is the question as to which court has jurisdiction in context of blockchain disputes based on the international and anonymous structure. These systems also offer a high level of anonymity to their participants. Given these scenarios it has to be considered that blockchains with shared use of distributed ledgers by several competitors might be a considerable risk under antitrust and competition laws. To get full value for future blockchain applications, a deep cooperation and collaboration on a common platform by all participants – that often will also be competitors – will be necessary. Although collaborating to achieve an outcome more efficiently is generally not sanctioned by antitrust laws, there are still potential antitrust concerns to be considered. And finally, due to the automatic and irreversible execution of blockchain transactions, one has also to think about technical precautions for enforcing any possible court decisions. All these challenges for the future will ask for a strong self-regulation of the market participants in the digital marketplace.

A practical, secure, and auditable e-voting system

A cryptographic electronic voting system is proposed, to replace the conventional voting methods, which are widely used in most developing countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The proposed e-voting system is based on the concept of Prêt à Voter, which is a paper ballot e-voting scheme. Mixnet based e-voting schemes such as Prêt à Voter use mix servers to create anonymous channels. These schemes have some shortcomings; Mixnets need complex protocols for generating and maintaining shared mix keys, as well as for mixing and proving correctness of the shuffles. Moreover, Mixnets are complex to implement on a large scale. Mixnets are also vulnerable to corrupt or faulty mix servers as well. The proposed e-voting scheme eliminates the need for anonymous channels to anonymize the votes in Mixnet based e-voting schemes, yet provides comparable level of security and vote anonymity with less system complexity. The proposed e-voting scheme uses paper ballots, due to its familiarity among the public, but with strong cryptographic algorithms with proven security features, to provide enhanced level of ballot secrecy, verifiability and security. The proposed scheme is simple, secure, practical, and auditable. Security evaluation is conducted based on the critical and desirable properties of e-voting to support the claimed aspects. Threat analysis of the proposed e-voting system had been conducted to prove its resistance to well-known attacks on e-voting schemes and systems. A proof of concept implementation and simulation of the proposed e-voting scheme was developed to elucidate its efficiency, practicality, and scalability. The research proposal has the potential to be deployed as a trustworthy e-voting system, to replace the conventional voting methods in developing countries.

Exploring and Analyzing the Tor Hidden Services Graph

The exploration and analysis of Web graphs has flourished in the recent past, producing a large number of relevant and interesting research results. However, the unique characteristics of the Tor network limit the applicability of standard techniques and demand for specific algorithms to explore and analyze it. The attention of the research community has focused on assessing the security of the Tor infrastructure (i.e., its ability to actually provide the intended level of anonymity) and on discussing what Tor is currently being used for. Since there are no foolproof techniques for automatically discovering Tor hidden services, little or no information is available about the topology of the Tor Web graph. Even less is known on the relationship between content similarity and topological structure. The present article aims at addressing such lack of information. Among its contributions: a study on automatic Tor Web exploration/data collection approaches; the adoption of novel representative metrics for evaluating Tor data; a novel in-depth analysis of the hidden services graph; a rich correlation analysis of hidden services’ semantics and topology. Finally, a broad interesting set of novel insights/considerations over the Tor Web organization and content are provided.

Situational Influences on Condom Purchasing

Despite the well-documented role of condoms in safe sex, people frequently fail to use them. Embarrassment and other negative emotions that occur while acquiring condoms may make it less likely that people will consistently purchase condoms, subsequently decreasing condom use. It is important to examine how situational factors affect emotions related to condom purchasing behaviors. Two experiments examined the influence of different condom purchasing situations on emotions felt and willingness to purchase condoms. Participants imagined one of three condom purchasing scenarios: anonymously at a self-checkout counter, non-anonymously at a regular checkout counter, or asking for condoms from a locked display. Results revealed that participants’ self-reported willingness to purchase condoms increased as levels of anonymity increased. Similarly, participants reported more positive emotions as anonymity increased. A negative correlation between negative emotion and willingness to purchase condoms also emerged. Overall, results suggest a need for businesses to help provide anonymity to customers, perhaps through incorporating self-checkouts into their stores to potentially decrease negative emotion felt and increase condom sales and potentially consistent condom use.

Anticipating anonymity in screening program databases

In this paper, we propose a technique for improving anonymity in screening program databases to increase the privacy for the participants in these programs. The data generated by the invitation process (screening centre, appointment date) is often made available to researchers for medical research and for evaluation and improvement of the screening program. This information, combined with other personal quasi-identifiers such as the ZIP code, gender or age, can pose a risk of disclosing the identity of the individuals participating in the program, and eventually their test results. We present two algorithms that produce a set of screening appointments that aim to increase anonymity of the resulting dataset. The first one, based on the constraint programming paradigm, defines the optimal appointments, while the second one is a suboptimal heuristic algorithm that can be used with real size datasets. The level of anonymity is measured using the new concept of generalized k-anonymity, which allows us to show the utility of the proposal by means of experiments, both using random data and data based on screening invitations from the Norwegian Cancer Registry.

What’s your anonymity worth? Establishing a marketplace for the valuation and control of individuals’ anonymity and personal data

PurposeThe viability of online anonymity is questioned in today’s online environment where many technologies enable tracking and identification of individuals. In light of the shortcomings of the government, industry and consumers in protecting anonymity, it is clear that a new perspective for ensuring anonymity is needed. Where current stakeholders have failed to protect anonymity, some proponents argue that economic models exist for valuation of anonymity. By placing a monetary value on anonymity through Rawls’ concept of primary goods, it is possible to create a marketplace for anonymity, therefore allowing users full control of how their personal data is used. This paper aims to explore the creation of a data marketplace, offering users the possibility of engaging with companies and other entities to sell and auction personal data. Importantly, participation in a marketplace does not sacrifice one’s anonymity, as there are different levels of anonymity in online systems.Design/methodology/approachThe paper uses a conceptual framework based on the abstractions of anonymity and data valuation.FindingsThe manuscript constructs a conceptual foundation for exploring the development and deployment of a personal data marketplace. By suggesting features allowing individuals’ control of their personal data, and properly establishing monetary valuation of one’s personal data, it is argued that individuals will undertake a more proactive management of personal data.Originality/valueAn overview of the available services and products offering increased anonymity is explored, in turn, illustrating the beginnings of a market response for anonymity as a valuable good. By placing a monetary value on individuals’ anonymity, it is reasoned that individuals will more consciously protect their anonymity in ways where legislation and other practices (i.e. privacy policies, marketing opt-out) have failed.

An Analysis of the Legal Systems and Mechanisms Introduced in the European Union in the Fight Against Cyberspace Threats

The ability to conduct attacks in cyberspace from any location in the world, together with a high level of anonymity for the perpetrator, underlines the global nature of this issue. Consequently, threats within cyberspace have become one of the most serious challenges for the national and economic security of countries. The immaterial character of cyberspace and the threats emerging from within its framework transcend borders in respect of both the subject and territorial dimension. The illegal activities conducted in cyberspace are also connected with the low, and constantly decreasing, costs of initiating and conducting attacks along with the relatively high possibility of by the attacking entity remaining anonymous.3 Cyber-security strategies are the response of the European Union and its Member States to the emerging threats. Developing national strategies is a relatively new trend. In such documents Member States present their national perspective in respect of cyberspace protection as well as the rules of conduct, perception of the threat, risk assessment and a strategic objective complemented by other specific objectives. These documents help national decision-makers with policy making in terms of cyberspace protection and the allocation of the resources essential for its development. Apart from cyberspace, strategies designate crucial areas of the state’s functioning as principal area of the protection that require special preventive action, i.e. critical infrastructure, economic development, national security, social development and a sense of security as a component within information-communications technologies applications.

One-Way Mirrors in Online Dating: A Randomized Field Experiment

The growing popularity of online dating websites is altering one of the most fundamental human activities: finding a date or a marriage partner. Online dating platforms offer new capabilities, such as extensive search, big data–based mate recommendations, and varying levels of anonymity, whose parallels do not exist in the physical world. Yet little is known about the causal effects of these new features. In this study we examine the impact of a particular anonymity feature, which is unique to online environments, on matching outcomes. This feature allows users to browse profiles of other users anonymously, by being able to check out a potential mate’s profile while not leaving any visible online record of the visit. Although this feature may decrease search costs and allow users to search without inhibition, it also eliminates “weak signals” of interest for their potential mates that may play an important role in establishing successful communication. We run a randomized field experiment on a major North American online dating website, where 50,000 of 100,000 randomly selected new users are gifted the ability to anonymously view profiles of other users. Compared with the control group, the users treated with anonymity become disinhibited, in that they view more profiles and are more likely to view same-sex and interracial mates. However, based on our analysis, we demonstrate causally that weak signaling is a key mechanism in achieving higher levels of matching outcomes. Anonymous users, who lose the ability to leave a weak signal, end up having fewer matches compared with their nonanonymous counterparts. This effect of anonymity is particularly strong for women, who tend not to make the first move and instead rely on the counterparty to initiate the communication. Further, the reduction in quantity of matches by anonymous users is not compensated by a corresponding increase in quality of matches. This paper was accepted by Lorin Hitt, information systems.

SPACE PARTITIONING FOR PRIVACY ENABLED 3D CITY MODELS

Abstract. Due to recent technological progress, data capturing and processing of highly detailed (3D) data has become extensive. And despite all prospects of potential uses, data that includes personal living spaces and public buildings can also be considered as a serious intrusion into people’s privacy and a threat to security. It becomes especially critical if data is visible by the general public. Thus, a compromise is needed between open access to data and privacy requirements which can be very different for each application. As privacy is a complex and versatile topic, the focus of this work particularly lies on the visualization of 3D urban data sets. For the purpose of privacy enabled visualizations of 3D city models, we propose to partition the (living) spaces into privacy regions, each featuring its own level of anonymity. Within each region, the depicted 2D and 3D geometry and imagery is anonymized with cartographic generalization techniques. The underlying spatial partitioning is realized as a 2D map generated as a straight skeleton of the open space between buildings. The resulting privacy cells are then merged according to the privacy requirements associated with each building to form larger regions, their borderlines smoothed, and transition zones established between privacy regions to have a harmonious visual appearance. It is exemplarily demonstrated how the proposed method generates privacy enabled 3D city models.

Anonymity and incentives: An investigation of techniques to reduce socially desirable responding in the Trust Game

AbstractEconomic games offer a convenient approach for the study of prosocial behavior. As an advantage, they allow for straightforward implementation of different techniques to reduce socially desirable responding. We investigated the effectiveness of the most prominent of these techniques, namely providing behavior-contingent incentives and maximizing anonymity in three versions of the Trust Game: (i) a hypothetical version without monetary incentives and with a typical level of anonymity, (ii) an incentivized version with monetary incentives and the same (typical) level of anonymity, and (iii) an indirect questioning version without incentives but with a maximum level of anonymity, rendering responses inconclusive due to adding random noise via the Randomized Response Technique. Results from a large (N= 1,267) and heterogeneous sample showed comparable levels of trust for the hypothetical and incentivized versions using direct questioning. However, levels of trust decreased when maximizing the inconclusiveness of responses through indirect questioning. This implies that levels of trust might be particularly sensitive to changes in individuals’ anonymity but not necessarily to monetary incentives.

Endogenous Social Preferences

A long-standing discussion in economics has developed around the issue of whether institutions (specifically markets) affect peoples' social preferences. One theory posits that markets force people to interact repeatedly, and in so doing reduce anonymity, curtail opportunistic behavior, and make agents more socially minded. The opposing view contends that markets are alienating because they make interactions more (not less) anonymous and competition erodes peoples' preferences to engage in selfless, group-beneficial acts. This paper presents the results of an experiment designed to quantify the extent to which different aspects of markets affect peoples' social preferences by varying the level of anonymity, the incentive to reciprocate friendly acts, and the degree of competition. We find that reducing anonymity does make people nicer, but mostly because reducing anonymity reduces peoples' ability to engage in opportunistic acts. More importantly, we find that market competition erodes social preferences through two mechanisms. First, market competition encourages opportunistic behavior which creates a less friendly atmosphere and second, controlling for the first effect, the market institution itself decreases the other-regardingness of our participants.

Anonymity in Peer-assisted CDNs: Inference Attacks and Mitigation

Abstract The peer-assisted CDN is a new content distribution paradigm supported by CDNs (e.g., Akamai), which enables clients to cache and distribute web content on behalf of a website. Peer-assisted CDNs bring significant bandwidth savings to website operators and reduce network latency for users. In this work, we show that the current designs of peer-assisted CDNs expose clients to privacy-invasive attacks, enabling one client to infer the set of browsed resources of another client. To alleviate this, we propose an anonymous peer-assisted CDN (APAC), which employs content delivery while providing initiator anonymity (i.e., hiding who sends the resource request) and responder anonymity (i.e., hiding who responds to the request) for peers. APAC can be a web service, compatible with current browsers and requiring no client-side changes. Our anonymity analysis shows that our APAC design can preserve a higher level of anonymity than state-of-the-art peer-assisted CDNs. In addition, our evaluation demonstrates that APAC can achieve desired performance gains.

Source Anonymity in WSNs against Global Adversary Utilizing Low Transmission Rates with Delay Constraints.

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are deployed for many applications such as tracking and monitoring of endangered species, military applications, etc. which require anonymity of the origin, known as Source Location Privacy (SLP). The aim in SLP is to prevent unauthorized observers from tracing the source of a real event by analyzing the traffic in the network. Previous approaches to SLP such as Fortified Anonymous Communication Protocol (FACP) employ transmission of real or fake packets in every time slot, which is inefficient. To overcome this shortcoming, we developed three different techniques presented in this paper. Dummy Uniform Distribution (DUD), Dummy Adaptive Distribution (DAD) and Controlled Dummy Adaptive Distribution (CAD) were developed to overcome the anonymity problem against a global adversary (which has the capability of analyzing and monitoring the entire network). Most of the current techniques try to prevent the adversary from perceiving the location and time of the real event whereas our proposed techniques confuse the adversary about the existence of the real event by introducing low rate fake messages, which subsequently lead to location and time privacy. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed techniques provide reasonable delivery ratio, delay, and overhead of a real event's packets while keeping a high level of anonymity. Three different analysis models are conducted to verify the performance of our techniques. A visualization of the simulation data is performed to confirm anonymity. Further, neural network models are developed to ensure that the introduced techniques preserve SLP. Finally, a steganography model based on probability is implemented to prove the anonymity of the techniques.

Design and Performance Evaluation of Two Approaches to Obtain Anonymity in Transferable Electronic Ticketing Schemes

Electronic tickets demonstrate, without the use of paper, the possession of the right to access or use of a service. In this scenario, the security and privacy achieved in the paper-based system must be preserved in the electronic ticketing systems. In addition to these requirements, the transferability of a ticket from one user to another (without involving a third party) is very useful but also generates other issues to be solved in terms of security and privacy. For example, the users that transfer the same ticket twice must be identified (it is a fraud), but the rest of users have to preserve their privacy (anonymity). In this article we present two proposals of an electronic ticketing system with anonymity and transferability, based on the use of RSA signatures or group signatures, respectively, thus presenting different levels of complexity and anonymity. Moreover, we have implemented both proposals and its performance has been evaluated. The results of this evaluation are useful in order to prove the viability of the proposals even when complex cryptography is used. The strength of the anonymity and the execution costs are the parameters to take into account to choose the more adequate proposal for a specific application.

Impact of hash value truncation on ID anonymity in Wireless Sensor Networks

Hash functions have been used to address security requirements such as integrity, message authentication and non-repudiation. In WSNs, these functions are also used to preserve sensor nodes’ identity (ID) anonymity, i.e., they are used to generate and verify dynamic pseudonyms that are used to identify sensor nodes in a communication session. In this latter application, there is an open issue as to how long the output of a hash function (i.e. hash value) we should use in pseudonym generation. The longer the hash value, the longer is the pseudonym, thus the harder it is to guess a pseudonym that is generated by using a hash function. On the other hand, the use of a longer hash value also means that the bandwidth and energy costs in transmitting the pseudonym will be higher. As sensor nodes typically have limited resources and are battery powered, the balance between the protection level of ID anonymity and performance and energy costs incurred in providing such a protection is an open issue. This paper investigates the use of hash value truncation in preserving ID anonymity in WSNs and the impact of hash value truncation on four criteria attributes (security against brute force attacks, probability of pseudonym collisions, energy trade-off and end-to-end packet delivery delay). It reports the possible impacts of other factors including the type and usage of hash functions, sensor node capabilities, adversary capabilities, ability to resolve pseudonym collisions, network density and data collection rate. The results show that the impacts of these factors may be contradictory. Therefore, the determination of an optimal level of hash value truncation should consider all trade-offs brought by these factors.

Finding large degree-anonymous subgraphs is hard

A graph is said to be k-anonymous for an integer k, if for every vertex in the graph there are at least k−1 other vertices with the same degree. We examine the computational complexity of making a given undirected graph k-anonymous either through at most s vertex deletions or through at most s edge deletions; the corresponding problem variants are denoted by Anonym V-Del and Anonym E-Del.We present a variety of hardness results, most of them hold for both problems. The two variants are intractable from the parameterized as well as from the approximation point of view. In particular, we show that both variants remain NP-hard on very restricted graph classes like trees even if k=2. We further prove that both variants are W[1]-hard with respect to the combined parameter solutions size s and anonymity level k. With respect to approximability, we obtain hardness results showing that neither variant can be approximated in polynomial time within a factor better than n12 (unless P=NP). Furthermore, for the optimization variants where the solution size s is given and the task is to maximize the anonymity level k, this inapproximability result even holds if we allow a running time of f(s)⋅nO(1) for any computable function f. On the positive side, we classify both problem variants as fixed-parameter tractable with respect to the combined parameter solution size s and maximum degree Δ.