Anonymity: Securing User Privacy on the Internet

Florida State University, Tallahassee FL

Investigators

Abstract

Today the World Wide Web is the foundation of e-commerce (including, e-advertisement, e-banking, etc.) Unfortunately, the World Wide Web does not offer good support for anonymity (called "privacy" in the popular press). While in a mechanical society window shoppers do not need to identify themselves, they implicitly or explicitly do so (to a certain extend) when using the World Wide Web. "Privacy" concerns may limit the growth and the use of the internet. The state of the art techniques to guarantee anonymity only provide weak security, or are too expensive to be used, or are completely impractical. Moreover, some protocols have been broken. The goals are: 1. to revisit and to (crypt) analyze existing protocols, 2. to study more efficient protocols to achieve robust anonymous communication, 3. to develop protocols to guarantee anonymity even when insiders are trying to break the anonymity, or trying to disrupt the anonymous communication, 4. to address the user-friendly aspect of cookies, without endangering the anonymity of the communication, 5. to enhance very secure (called unconditionally secure) protocols for anonymous communication, 6. to study limited anonymity.