Establishing bilateral anonymous communication in open networks

Abstract

Confidential and authenticated communication is an elementary necessity in open networks like the Internet and has already been realised. In the last years one more criterion of security has become conscious to users of the Internet: Privacy. Especially in the most popular service of the Internet, the World Wide Web (WWW), this need has become obvious. There, users want to anonymously access web pages to leave as little information as possible while browsing. Vice versa it is quite legitimate and understandable in the aspect of multilateral security, that provider of web pages want to offer these pages in the same way. At first glance, these properties of confidence, authenticity, and anonymity are very contradictory. How can mutual anonymous partners contact each other and exchange authenticated keys to securely communicate with each other? This article shows a solution to this problem, using pseudonym based signatures and an architecture providing untraceability via a mix net and two kinds of trusted third parties.