A combinatorial approach for an anonymity metric

Abstract

A number of papers are suggested with the goal to measure the quality of anonymity of a given anonymity system. Most of them use the anonymity set as the basis for developing, reasoning about and applying measure. In this paper we argue that these approaches are premature. In this work we suggest to use the so called hypothesis set - a term derived from possibilistic information flow theory. Investigating the hypothesis set, it is possible to make the "protection structure" explicit and also define well known terms from measurement theory like scale and metric. We demonstrate our approach by evaluating the hypothesis set of the classical Chaumian Mix. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.