Revocable anonymity

Abstract

Anonymity services in the EU may be forced by the new EU data retention directive to collect connection data and deanonymise some of their users in case of serious crimes. For this purpose, we propose a new privacy-friendly solution for incorporating revocation in an anonymous communication system. In contrast to other known methods, our scheme does not reveal the identity of a user to any other entity involved in the revocation procedure but the law enforcement agency. Another advantage is, that no user will need to provide more identifying information than his connection (IP) address, that is what he needs to communicate with the system anyway. The proposed scheme is based mainly on threshold group signatures and threshold atomic proxy re-encryption. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.