IACR News item: 07 February 2014
Michael Backes, Aniket Kate, Praveen Manoharan, Sebastian Meiser, Esfandiar Mohammadi
ePrint ReportIn this work we present AnoA: a generic framework for defining, analyzing, and quantifying anonymity properties for AC protocols. AnoA relies on a novel relaxation of the notion of (computational) differential privacy, and thereby enables a unified quantitative analysis of well- established anonymity properties, such as sender anonymity, sender unlinkability, and relationship anonymity. While an anonymity analysis in AnoA can be conducted in a purely information theoretical manner, we show that the protocol\'s anonymity properties established in AnoA carry over to secure cryptographic instantiations of the protocol. We exemplify the applicability of AnoA for analyzing real-life systems by conducting a thorough analysis of the anonymity properties provided by the Tor network against passive adversarys. Our analysis significantly improves on known anonymity results from the literature.
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