Speaker: Yona Raekow
Day:  Wednesday, 4/19/2006
Room: ITEB 336
Time: 3:30pm

Title: Selectively Traceable Anonymity

Abstract. One serious impediment to the widespread adoption of anonymous communication protocols is the threat of abuse. Anonymous communication can, by its very nature, facilitate socially unacceptable behavior. In this talk I present one approach to dealing with abuse:selective traceability.  A system for anonymous communication is said to be selectively traceable if it allows the tracing of a message’s sender after a set of sensible conditions have been met (e.g., both the FBI and the ACLU have agreed to trace the message, or 90% of the users agree that the message should be traced, etc.). This talk introduces general techniques to transform a large class of anonymous communication protocols (including most of those that have been proposed so far, such as DC-Nets, Mix-Nets, and their derivatives) into selectively traceable anonymous communication protocols. I also present more efficient modifications to an existing anonymous communication protocol that do not affect the asymptotic efficiency of the underlying scheme. The resulting protocol is provably secure against malicious adversaries.

References: Selectively Traceable Anonymity by Luis v. Ahn, Andrew Bortz, Nicholas Hopper and Kevin O'Neill, in submission