Design and Verification of Anonymous Trust Protocols

Abstract

I should say up-front that our focus is more on design and verification, and on anonymity, and we take a pretty simplistic view on trust at the moment, but I really will appreciate your feedback on what else to model in the area of trust. This is joint work with Matteo.

What is anonymity? Let me make a general statement here, anonymity is a friend of the freedom of information, so if you are browsing the web it’s actually convenient to anonymously collect data, and also to post data anonymously. However, anonymity is also the enemy of trust, because if you download things which have been posted anonymously, it’s hard to say if they make sense, what the trust level is, what the level of integrity is, if you would trust a person that posted the stuff if you knew who the person was. So what you actually have are two conflicting requirements, anonymity on the one hand, trust on the other hand, so the question is, can we get both, stay anonymous but still be sufficiently convinced that whatever I’m getting from the internet from a certain protocol gives me a certain level of trust.