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Probabilistic Anonymity

  • Conference paper
CONCUR 2005 – Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 3653))

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Abstract

The concept of anonymity comes into play in a wide range of situations, varying from voting and anonymous donations to postings on bulletin boards and sending mails. The systems for ensuring anonymity often use random mechanisms which can be described probabilistically, while the agents’ interest in performing the anonymous action may be totally unpredictable, irregular, and hence expressable only nondeterministically.

Formal definitions of the concept of anonymity have been investigated in the past either in a totally nondeterministic framework, or in a purely probabilistic one. In this paper, we investigate a notion of anonymity which combines both probability and nondeterminism, and which is suitable for describing the most general situation in which both the systems and the user can have both probabilistic and nondeterministic behavior. We also investigate the properties of the definition for the particular cases of purely nondeterministic users and purely probabilistic users.

We formulate our notions of anonymity in terms of observables for processes in the probabilistic π-calculus, whose semantics is based on Probabilistic Automata.

We illustrate our ideas by using the example of the dining cryptographers.

This work has been partially supported by the Project Rossignol of the ACI Sécurité Informatique (Ministère de la recherche et nouvelles technologies).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Indian Institute of Technology Delhi,  

    Mohit Bhargava

  2. INRIA Futurs and LIX, École Polytechnique,  

    Catuscia Palamidessi

Authors
  1. Mohit Bhargava
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  2. Catuscia Palamidessi
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, Santa Cruz

    Martín Abadi

  2. University of California, Santa Cruz, USA

    Luca de Alfaro

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Bhargava, M., Palamidessi, C. (2005). Probabilistic Anonymity. In: Abadi, M., de Alfaro, L. (eds) CONCUR 2005 – Concurrency Theory. CONCUR 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3653. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11539452_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11539452_16

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-28309-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31934-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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