A pseudonymous communications infrastructure for the internet
Ian Goldberg, Eric Brewer · 2000
As more and more of people's everyday activities are being conducted online, there is an ever-increasing threat to personal privacy. Every communicative or commercial transaction you perform online reveals bits of information about you that can be compiled into large dossiers, often without your permission, or even your knowledge. This work presents the design and analysis of a Pseudonymous Communications Infrastructure for the Internet, which we call a Pseudonymous IP Network, or PIP Network. This system allows parties to communicate in real time over the Internet without being forced to reveal their identities, thus forming the basis for communications and electronic commerce systems that respect the privacy of the individual. This work also presents the Nymity Slider, an abstraction that can be useful when talking about how much personally identifying information a given transaction reveals, and when designing privacy-friendly technologies. We discuss why pseudonymity, rather than anonymity, is the goal of this project. Finally, we introduce the primitive of the rendezvous server, which allows a system such as the PIP Network, which protects the privacy of the users of Internet services, to be turned around to protect the privacy of the providers of those services as well.