A conceptual framework for specification, analysis, and design of anonymity services

Abstract

Anonymity is an important issue in information security, which its main goal is to protect entities privacy in the systems. Different methods and protocols (with different types of anonymity services) have been developed so far to provide special anonymity requirements of applications. Each of these systems has been developed with different ad hoc approaches. In this paper we present a conceptual framework that makes specification, analysis and design of anonymity applications more systematic. To do this, first we go toward presenting a conceptual model of anonymity which can be used in clear description of different aspects of anonymity. Then we extract a list of anonymity primitives from the existing anonymity providing methods. These primitives are base functions which can be composed to form anonymity services to provide specified anonymity requirements of the system. Copyright 2009 ACM.