An Anonymity Revocation Technology for Anonymous Communication

A number of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) have been proposed in the last three decades offering unconditional communication anonymity to their users. Unconditional anonymity can, however, be a security threat because it allows users to employ a PET in order to act maliciously while hiding their identity. In the last few years, several technologies which revoke the identity of users who use PETs have been proposed. These are known as anonymity revocation technologies (ARTs). However, the construction of ARTs has been developed in an ad-hoc manner without a theoretical basis outlining the goals and underlying principles. In this paper we present a set of fundamental principles and requirements for construction of an ART, identifying the necessary features. We then propose an abstract scheme for construction of an ART based on these features.