Anonymous Channel Research Articles

Keeping medical information safe and confidential: a qualitative study on perceptions of Israeli physicians

BackgroundPatients expect their information to remain confidential, and physicians have a legal and ethical obligation to keep it this way. Confidentiality is not just a legal requirement but a crucial element in establishing trust between patients and healthcare providers. Patients must feel confident that their personal and medical information is kept confidential and shared only with those who need to know. Previous studies have primarily concentrated on patients’ perceptions of medical confidentiality, data privacy, and data protection issues. However, research on the practical practices and perceptions of medical confidentiality among hospital physicians is scant, underscoring the need for a deeper understanding of this critical issue.MethodsThrough qualitative methods and as part of a large-scale study on aspects of patient dignity and responsiveness in Israel, physicians shared their views and practices on managing medical information.ResultsThe study revealed the practical challenges physicians face in upholding various aspects of data protection within hospital settings. These challenges, strategies, and deviations from data protection principles that physicians discussed are of significant practical relevance. The importance of patient consent and the practical measures for safeguarding patient information were also highlighted. While physicians acknowledged the importance of protecting patient information, they also grappled with the realities of doing so in a complex healthcare environment. In future healthcare policies, it is critical to ensure robust measures are in place to safeguard and uphold medical confidentiality. These can include specific measures to increase compliance, such as regularly monitoring compliance with confidentiality policies, producing safe and anonymous channels to voice concerns, and enforcing consequences for any breaches to ensure accountability.ConclusionsWhile protecting medical information has emerged as an important goal, it is equally crucial to strike a balance between the need to share information to advance and provide quality medical care. Physicians and policymakers must navigate this delicate balance. Additionally, organizations should strengthen compliance to enhance their monitoring and enforcement of confidentiality policies. Ineffective implementation of medical confidentiality leads to theoretical guidelines that do not translate effectively into practice.

Beyond the Surface

This study uses the online disinhibition effect as a theoretical framework for understanding disclosures of ADHD on non-anonymous (Facebook) and anonymous (Reddit) channels. Specifically, a quantitative content analysis compared public Facebook and Reddit posts in terms of disclosure depth. Posts were coded as either peripheral, intermediate, or core disclosures. In this context, the results aligned with the online disinhibition effect; Reddit had greater disclosure and depth of disclosure compared to those on Facebook. The implications of this study demonstrate how self-disclosure depth varies within understudied groups (i.e., individuals posting on ADHD threads) in online contexts. This study also adds to prior research by examining anonymity on multiple channels.

Selective comparison of verifiable online voting systems

AbstractThis paper aims to provide a guideline for identifying the most suitable online voting system under the given requirements and acceptable tradeoffs. We have selected twelve (more or less) well‐known online voting systems that rely on distinct cryptographic mechanisms for achieving security. For each of the systems, we summarized the key architectural and cryptographic ideas behind their design. Then, we analyzed the required trust assumptions for achieving the three most important security properties (i.e., verifiability, divided between cast‐as‐intended, recorded‐as‐cast, and tallied‐as‐recorded verifiabilities, privacy, and receipt‐freeness). To make a fair comparison, we did our analysis based on identical security definitions. Note that we selected wildly known and well‐accepted definitions, which are scheme‐neutral, to avoid any biases. Also, we discussed some of the most critical practical aspects of those systems, such as–the necessity for secure or anonymous channels, reliance on secure printer facilities and so forth. To facilitate the comparison, we suggested a unified naming convention for system elements based on their roles and functions. Then, based on the unified naming convention, we compared all twelve online voting systems for both the security properties and practical aspects. Finally, we summarized our observations regarding patterns and dependencies we observed, provided guidelines for selecting the online voting system, and gave recommendations regarding system design. We hope our work contributes to the online literature and facilitates the process of selecting the most suitable e‐voting system depending on the requirements of a specific election.

Movement meaning of money: Monetary mobilization in Hong Kong’s prodemocracy movement

The resource mobilization (RM) theory has long discovered the significance of money for protests; yet can this insight be applied to nowadays’ decentralized movements, characterized by the absence of organizational leadership and more creative and spontaneous participation from below? While the RM perspective is anchored in a political economy of organizational fundraising, it is time to bring in Viviana Zelizer’s economic sociology to understand how participants utilize the role of donors, consumers, savers, and investors for the movement purpose. Focusing on Hong Kong’s prodemocracy movement, this article theorizes the full panoply of ‘monetary mobilization’ to revise RM’s narrow conception. By offering a safer and anonymous channel of expression, monetary mobilization emerges as a substitute for in-person participation for risk-averse citizens with financial means. Money is always loaded with symbolic meanings and ethical considerations so that it also functions as a vehicle of the moral outrage and utopian aspirations. Participants are keen to establish a proper relationship between sponsors and beneficiaries by exercising diligent oversight to prevent its corruption. Contrary to the instrumentalist conception, money is per se not a fully fungible and all-purpose resource.

Development of a secure remote voting system and research on the characteristics of its anonymity

Currently, the task of creating a reliable and anonymous remote voting system is relevant. Existing voting systems either do not fully meet the requirements of anonymity, or are closed from research. A scheme was developed for creating an anonymous remote voting system based on the blind electronic signature protocol and the algorithm for creating an anonymous channel. This paper describes possible threats and vulnerabilities of the protocols on which the scheme for constructing an anonymous voting system is based including the threat of a hacker’s sabotage sending his own or other people's ballots over a communication channel. The presented optimized version of the algorithm for creating anonymous remote voting system guarantees the impossibility of fake ballots or their reuse and also excludes possible attempts to sabotage the forwarding of ballots by voters. Formulas for calculating the optimal value of p the probability of sending a ballot directly to the server is defined. It is shown that the value of p must be calculated depending on the number of voters in order to achieve the maximum anonymity of the participants' votes.

A quantum resistant multi-user signcryption scheme featuring key invisibility for Internet of Things

With the advent of ubiquitous computing, multiple heterogeneous devices have evolved with increased connectivity, yielding the Internet of Things (IoT). For establishing secure communication, IoT has effectively become a primary security concern. The massive connectivity of the resource-constrained devices in IoT and enormous data on the air have made information vulnerable to several types of attacks. Although several resource-intensive cryptographic algorithms have been proposed to combat this security threat, signcryption has been identified as a sound solution for such an application.In this work, we propose an isogeny-based signcryption scheme by integrating HyPKE, an isogeny-based encryption scheme with an isogeny-based signature SeaSign based on Fiat Shamir with aborts. Apart from confidentiality and authenticity requirements, our scheme also achieves ciphertext anonymity and key invisibility, unlike the existing signcryption schemes in the post-quantum world. More positively, our security model considers insider attacks, supports multi-users setting and offers non-repudiation. Our work also studies the key privacy notion of the isogeny-based encryption scheme Hashed-PKE, which can be of independent interest in designing several anonymous channels or privacy-preserving protocols. More precisely, we showed Hashed-PKE achieves indistinguishability of keys against chosen-plaintext attack. This leads to the indistinguishability of keys against chosen-ciphertext attack security of HyPKE, a hybrid encryption scheme that is obtained by applying the Fujisaki Okamoto transformation to Hashed-PKE. We have proved our result in the standard model assuming the hardness of the Commutative Supersingular Decisional Diffie–Hellman assumption.

Shuffle Differential Private Data Aggregation for Random Population

Bridging the advantages of differential privacy in both centralized model (i.e., high accuracy) and local model (i.e., minimum trust), the shuffle privacy model has potential applications in many privacy-sensitive scenarios, such as mobile user data aggregation and federated learning. Since messages from users are anonymized by semi-trusted shufflers (e.g., anonymous channels, edge servers), every user could hide message among other users’ messages and inject only part of noises (a.k.a. privacy amplification). However, existing works assume that the participating user population is known in advance, which is unrealistic for dynamic environments (e.g., mobile computing, vehicular networks). In this work, we study the shuffle privacy model with a random participating population, and give privacy amplification bounds for population size with commonly encountered binomial, Poisson, sub-Gaussian distribution and etc. For further improving accuracy, we formulate and derive optimal dummy sizes for both non-adaptive and adaptive dummies. Finally, to break the error barrier due to the constraint of sending one single message per user, we design a multi-message shuffle private protocol supporting random population. Experiment results show that our approaches reduce more than <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$60\%$</tex-math></inline-formula> error when compared to the local model and naive approaches. We hope this work provides tailored solutions of shuffle privacy for dynamic mobile/distributed computing.

Circuit-Free General-Purpose Multi-Party Computation via Co-Utile Unlinkable Outsourcing

Multiparty computation (MPC) consists in several parties engaging in joint computation in such a way that each party's input and output remain private to that party. Whereas MPC protocols for specific computations have existed since the 1980s, only recently general-purpose compilers have been developed to allow MPC on arbitrary functions. Yet, using today's MPC compilers requires substantial programming effort and skill on the user's side, among other things because nearly all compilers translate the code of the computation into a Boolean or arithmetic circuit. In particular, the circuit representation requires unrolling loops and recursive calls, which forces programmers to (often manually) define loop bounds and hardly use recursion. We present an approach allowing MPC on an arbitrary computation expressed as ordinary code with all functionalities that does not need to be translated into a circuit. Our notion of input and output privacy is predicated on unlinkability. Our method leverages co-utile computation outsourcing using anonymous channels via decentralized reputation, makes a minimalistic use of cryptography and does not require participants to be honest-but-curious: it works as long as participants are rational (self-interested), which may include rationally malicious peers (who become attackers if this is advantageous to them). We present example applications, including e-voting. Our empirical work shows that reputation captures well the behavior of peers and ensures that parties with high reputation obtain correct results.

Efficient and secure e‐voting scheme using elliptic curve cryptography

AbstractVoting allows the people to elect their representative and express their preferences. In modern day democracy, voting is one fundamental and most important tool for election. To strengthen this process, efforts must be made to achieve a confirmable and transparent voting system. Naturally, the veracity of the election process is of ultimate importance for the honor of the democracy itself. The online voting or e‐voting system is a cost‐effective procedure, which saves a lot of money and time spent for organizing the election. However, security, integrity of data and privacy of the voter are the increasing concerns in this context. In this paper, we have done a thorough literature survey of the various latest schemes in this context and found that the schemes prone to several security and privacy threats. Moreover, a major issue with all these schemes is that they are inefficient in terms of computation and communication overheads. With this motivation, we present a novel and efficient e‐voting scheme to tackle the security and privacy concerns. The proposed scheme is designed using the concept of blind signature, anonymous channel and trust worthy entities where elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) works as a backbone. The proposed scheme is formally evaluated using well known AVISPA simulation tool, which simulates the attack model using CL‐AtSe as well as OFMC backend according to Dolev‐Yao threat model. In both the cases, all the possible security threats are being nullified by the proposed scheme and results in safe communication. Also, the scheme is analyzed against all the possible attacks that jeopardize the integrity of the existing voting systems. Moreover, the proposed scheme is also compared with other prevailing schemes in terms of computation and communication overheads and found more efficient.

Toward Round-Efficient Verifiable Re-Encryption Mix-Net

Re-encryption mix-nets (RMNs) provide an efficient, cryptographic, anonymous channel for useful applications, such as e-voting and web browsing. Many studies have been devoted to achieving practically efficient RMN protocols, but less attention has been paid to addressing their round efficiency than to computation and communication measures. However, in many interactive cryptographic protocols, network latency governs the overall execution time. Because e-voting systems are particularly interaction intensive, the design of a round-efficient RMN protocol is of particular interest. We propose a constant-round RMN protocol in a three-party model that consists of senders, mix servers and some number of receivers. Here, the main role of the receivers is to jointly decrypt a list of ciphertexts obtained from the mixing stage. Such an explicit three-party model is most suitable for e-voting applications. We define an ideal three-party RMN in the universally composable (UC) framework. We then present a constant-round RMN protocol based on the standard assumptions and prove that it UC realizes the ideal three-party RMN with respect to a static adversary that can corrupt a minority of mix servers, disallowing receivers who collude with other players.We implement and evaluate our RMN protocol over various ranges of the numbers of senders and mix servers. Our evaluation shows that our protocol runs up to 2.5&#x00D7; faster than the Universal RMN protocol. In addition, we provide a detailed theoretical analysis of our protocol in terms of computation, transmission, and round efficiency.

Consumers' privacy choices in the era of big data

Recent progress in information technologies provides sellers with detailed knowledge about consumers' preferences, approaching perfect price discrimination in the limit. We construct a model where consumers with less strategic sophistication than the seller's pricing algorithm face a trade-off when buying. They choose between a direct, transaction cost-free sales channel and a privacy-protecting, but costly, anonymous channel. We show that the anonymous channel is used even in the absence of an explicit taste for privacy if consumers are not too strategically sophisticated. This provides a micro-foundation for consumers' privacy choices. Some consumers benefit but others suffer from their anonymization.

The Availability of Reporting Channels, Tone at the Top, and Whistleblowing Intentions

ABSTRACT SOX requires the establishment of anonymous whistleblowing channels for public companies, but private companies are free to implement the channel(s) of their choosing. Although anonymous channels have long been considered a “best practice,” the evidence on their efficacy is mixed, creating confusion as to how private companies should proceed. Additionally, most studies comparing non-anonymous and anonymous channels have used a within-participants design, where both channels are available, limiting their ability to determine the incremental effectiveness of different whistleblowing systems. We find that offering either an anonymous channel or dual channels improves reporting intentions, relative to a non-anonymous channel, but primarily when tone at the top is weak. When tone at the top is strong, reporting intentions are not statistically different across the three systems. We also find no evidence that dual channels improve whistleblowing intentions relative to an anonymous channel, regardless of the tone at the top.

Fast hybrid-MixNet for security and privacy using NTRU algorithm

Security and privacy-enhancing techniques are developed in order to provide strong protection over the Internet. These techniques aim to enable the users to keep their identities secret during the communication when they are forwarding an email, making payments online, and web browsing or posting to newsgroups. MixNet is the most practical solution for concealing the identities of messages and senders. The anonymous channel contains numerous routing protocols that consist of anonymous messages forwarding between nodes. The structure of MixNet is also based on this way to achieve anonymity. After the proposed work of Chaumian MixNet, many practical implementations of MixNet using many approaches and techniques are accomplished until now. In this paper, we propose the hybrid MixNet using NTRU asymmetric cryptosystem. We designed a mechanism for anonymous communication in which more people can participate in their secure communication. It hides the relation between input and output in each phase of Mix servers. The performance of Hybrid MixNet using NTRU is better than Hybrid Mixnet using ElGamal and ECC. In our proposed system, Hybrid MixNet using NTRU takes average time 16.4 milliseconds while Hybrid MixNet using ElGamal and ECC take 93.4 milliseconds and 182.2 milliseconds respectively.

Quantum Election Protocol Based on Quantum Public Key Cryptosystem

There is no quantum election protocol that can fulfil the eight requirements of an electronic election protocol, i.e., completeness, robustness, privacy, legality, unreusability, fairness, verifiability, and receipt-freeness. To address this issue, we employ the general construction of quantum digital signature and quantum public key encryption, in conjunction with classic public key encryption, to develop and instantiate a general construction of quantum election protocol. The proposed protocol exhibits the following advantages: (i) no pre-shared key between any two participants is required, and no trusted third party or anonymous channels are required. The protocol is suitable for large-scale elections with numerous candidates and voters and accommodates the situation in which multiple voters vote simultaneously. (ii) It is the first protocol that dismantles the contradiction between verifiability and receipt-freeness in a quantum election protocol. It satisfies all eight requirements stated earlier under the physical assumptions that there exists a one-way untappable channel from the administrator to the voter and that there is no collusion between any of the three parties in the protocol. Compared with current election protocols with verifiability and receipt-freeness, this protocol relies upon fewer physical assumptions. (iii) This construction is flexible and can be instantiated into an election scheme having post-quantum security by applying cryptographic algorithms conveying post-quantum security. Moreover, utilizing quantum digital signature and public key encryption yields a good result: the transmitted ballots are in quantum states, so owing to the no-cloning theorem, ballot privacy is less likely to be compromised, even if private keys of the signature and public key encryption are leaked after the election. However, in existing election protocols employing classic digital signatures and public key encryption, ballot privacy can be easily violated if attackers obtain private keys. Thus, our construction enhances privacy.

Media Sosial dan Whistleblowing

Artikel ini akan menjelaskan peran media sosial sebagai saluran whistleblowing yang digunakan untuk mendeteksi kecurangan (fraud). Dengan meningkatnya penggunaan media sosial di berbagai aktivitas kehidupan membuat media sosial telah beralih menjadi sarana pertukaran dan penyebaran informasi publik. Artikel ini mengelaborasi penggunaan media sosial sebagai saluran whistleblowing disamping saluran anonym lainnya. Perlu diketahui selama ini sistem whistleblowing dibangun hanya melalui saluran yang terintegrasi seperti website dan aplikasi khusus. Penelitian ini mengelaborasi partisipasi digital para warganet untuk menjadi whistleblower guna melaporkan berbagai indikasi kecurangan (fraud) melalui saluran media sosial. Metode penelitian menggunakan kualitatif ekxplanatoris dengan Teknik pengumpulan data melalui wawancara (in-dept interview). Artikel ini menyatakan bahwa media sosial telah berkonstribusi positif sebagai saluran whistleblowing dalam upaya mendeteksi fraud (kecurangan) di berbagai sektor.

A Practical E-Test System

this article presents an encryption system which has many characteristics, like anonymity, originality, correctness, confidentiality, durability and confirmation as well as no need to any trusted authority. Besides that the submitted system gives an evidence of the successful submission by using anonymity property. Additional to use the anonymous return channel, also use the timed-based solution. The proposed system has been implemented and its results were measured. The preliminary findings in this paper seem very promising. Also, the results show that the system is applicable and will yield good results if applied to new generations of mobile phones. Furthermore, the results show that the method is more efficient and faster than the system already in place.

Speech strategy of anonymity in communication

The article examines Internet channels as new communicative functional systems in Telegram Messenger as it often happens that there are some anonymous channels that refuse to disclose their authorship. The analysis of anonymity in Telegram shows that there is a special communicative strategy that can be a verbal provocation aimed at activating the communicative interest of readers on the one hand and, on the other hand, it is a way of avoiding responsibility for the reliability of the reported news. It is possible to confirm that the new trend appears that includes the mixture of mass media and interpersonal communications.

Consumers' Privacy Choices in the Era of Big Data

Recent progress in information technologies provides sellers with detailed knowledge about consumers' preferences, approaching perfect price discrimination in the limit.We construct a model where consumers with less strategic sophistication than the seller's pricing algorithm face a trade-off when buying. They choose between a direct, transaction cost-free sales channel and a privacy-protecting, but costly, anonymous channel. We show that the anonymous channel is used even in the absence of an explicit taste for privacy if consumers are not too strategically sophisticated. This provides a micro-foundation for consumers' privacy choices. Some consumers benefi t but others suffer from their anonymization.

Does Type of Fraudulent Act Have an Impact On Whistleblowing Intention?

The purpose of this research is to examine empirically the impact of two types of fraudulent act on individual’s reporting intention under reward model. This research applied the Reinforcement theory in designing whistleblowing policies. In this context, reward system in encouraging disclosure of fraudulent act was used. This study was designed using experiment method 2x2 between subjects with 86 participants from private universities. Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 requires that every public company must establish anonymous channel regarding disclosure of fraudulent act. However, under the reward system it may become different prediction that non-anonymous channel is preferable than the other one. Using two types of fraudulent act, this research investigated whether those types affected individual’s intention for disclosing fraud in choosing the reporting channel because a reward is provided or not. The result shows that the interaction between the type of fraudulent act and type of channel could encourage individual’s intention to blow the whistle. However, individual prefers to report the misappropriation of asset through anonymous channel than non-anonymous even though a reward is provided.

Looking for commitment: Finnish Open Access journals, infrastructure and funding

Watch the VIDEO here.Since 2015, the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies and the National Library of Finland have been working on a joint project (www.kotilava.fi), which aims to provide the 100+ Finnish scholarly journals with the support they need for moving to an Open Access publication model.In essence, the mission of the project is conservative. It aims to preserve the current infrastructure consisting of journals mostly run by scholarly societies. The journals are provided a shared publication platform (Journal.fi) that they can use for free, and there will also be a new source of funding for OA journals. However, although the journals are expected to follow certain standards including the use of peer-review, persistent identifiers and open licenses, they will retain their independence and they will be run by the researcher communities in each field as before.Some OA activists insist that journals are an old legacy mechanism which is no longer needed in scholarly communication. However, as far as the Finnish domestic journals are concerned, many of them actually do have a substantial audience as journals both within and beyond the academia. In many cases they are also an important incubator for new content, not just an anonymous publication channel for unsolicited articles.Although it might be possible to create a generic national platform which would provide tools sufficient for the evaluation and dissemination of articles, the current journal-based infrastructure seems to be supported and preferred by the researcher communities. Of course, this may change at some point, but at the moment it seems to be a better idea to work with the journals and try to enhance the current system by adopting new technologies and increasing the visibility and usability of the content.The project has been developing a consortium-based model in which the Finnish research organizations would provide funding for participating journals. Since the journals are not owned by commercial entities, the subscription costs paid by research libraries have been minimal. This means that extra money will be needed as it is not possible to simply flip the current subscription-based funding model.The negotiations with stakeholders are still underway, but there is some optimism that an agreement will be reached. Although the proposed model uses the number of articles as a basis for distributing the costs between organizations of different size and publication volume, it is not meant to be an APC model. Instead of being merely an exchange of money for specified services the idea is that the participating organizations will make a commitment to support the domestic OA journal infrastructure.Although the participating journals are allowed to introduce APCs for authors from organizations which are not part of the consortium, few of them are likely to do so. Some libraries have had concerns that this may lead to a free-rider problem (“why should we pay if others can get the same service for free?”), but we hope that the shared benefits provided by consortium-funded OA journals will outweigh these issues.