Abstract
We give a critical analysis of the system-wide anonymity metric of Edman et al. [3], which is based on the permanent value of a doubly-stochastic matrix. By providing an intuitive understanding of the permanent of such a matrix, we show that a metric that looks no further than this composite value is at best a rough indicator of anonymity. We identify situations where its inaccuracy is acute, and reveal a better anonymity indicator. Also, by constructing an information-preserving embedding of a smaller class of attacks into the wider class for which this metric was proposed, we show that this metric fails to possess desirable generalization properties. Finally, we present a new anonymity metric that does not exhibit these shortcomings. Our new metric is accurate as well as general.
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Bagai, R., Lu, H., Li, R., Tang, B. (2011). An Accurate System-Wide Anonymity Metric for Probabilistic Attacks. In: Fischer-Hübner, S., Hopper, N. (eds) Privacy Enhancing Technologies. PETS 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6794. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22263-4_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22263-4_7
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