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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Carlos Molina-Jimenez, Emeritus Professor Lindsay MarshallORCiD
Anonymity is an essential part of social structures. In the non-electronic world there are several services that are based on anonymous interactions between individuals. The migration of these services to the Internet world is unfeasible without the provision of anonymizers to guarantee anonymity. Anonymizers based on mix computers interposed between the sender and the receiver of an e-mail message have been used in the Internet for several years by senders of e-mail messages who do not wish to disclose their identity. Unfortunately, the degree of anonymity provided by this paradigm is limited and fragile. First, the messages sent are not truly anonymous but pseudo-anonymous since one of the mixes, at least, always knows the sender's identity. Secondly, the strength of the system to protect the sender's identity depends on the ability and willingness of the mixes to keep the secret. If the mixes fail, the sender's anonymity is reduced to pieces. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for sending truly anonymous messages over the Internet where the anonymous message is sent from a PDA which uses dynamically assigned temporary, non-personal, random IP and MAC addresses. Anonymous e-cash is used to pay for the service.
Author(s): Molina C, Marshall LF
Publication type: Report
Publication status: Published
Series Title: Department of Computing Science Technical Report Series
Year: 2001
Pages: 10
Print publication date: 01/01/2001
Source Publication Date: 2001
Report Number: 727
Institution: Department of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne
URL: http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/papers/727.pdf
