A Revised Classification of Anonymity

Abstract

This paper primarily addresses the issue of identifying all possible levels of digital anonymity, thereby allowing electronic services and mechanisms to be categorised. For this purpose, we sophisticate the generic idea of anonymity and, filling a niche in the field, bring the scope of trust into the focus of categorisation. One major concern of our work is to propose a novel and universal taxonomy which enables a dynamic, trust-based comparison between systems at an abstract level. On the other hand, our contribution intentionally does not offer an alternative to anonymity metrics, but neither is it concerned with methods of anonymous data retrieval (cf. data-mining techniques). However, for ease of comprehension, it provides a systematic 'application manual' and also presents a lucid overview of the correspondence between the current and related taxonomies. Additionally, as a generalisation of group signatures, we introduce the notion of group schemes.