Abstract
Current anonymous e-mail systems offer unconditional anonymity to their users which can provoke abusive behaviour. Dissatisfied users will drop out and liability issues may even force the system to suspend or cease its services. Therefore, controlling abuse is as important as protecting the anonymity of legitimate users when designing anonymous applications.
This paper describes the design and implementation AAEM, an accountable anonymous e-mail system. An existing anonymous e-mail system is enhanced with a control mechanism that allows for accountability. The system creates a trusted environment for senders, recipients and system operators. It provides a reasonable trade-off between anonymity, accountability, usability and flexibility.
Research assistant of the Research Foundation — Flanders (FWO — Vlaanderen)
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
David Mazieres and M. Frans Kaashoek. The design, Implementation and Operation of an Email Pseudonym Server. In Proceedings of the 5th ACM conference on Computer and communications security, p.27–36, November 02–05, 1998, San Francisco, California, United States.
P. Syverson, M. Reed and D. Goldschlag. Onion routing access configurations. In DARPA Information Survivability and Exposition (DISCEX 200), volume 1, p. 34–40. IEEE CS Press, 2000.
P. Syverson, G. Tsudik, M. Reed and C. Landwehr. Towards an Analysis of Onion Routing Security. In H. Federrath, editor, Designing Privacy Enhancing Technologies: Workshop on Design Issue in Anonymity and Unobservability, p.96–114. Springer-Verlag, LNCS 2009, July 2000.
M. Reed, P. Syverson and D. Goldschlag. Anonymous connections and onion routing. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 16(4): 482–494, May 1998.
U. Moller, L. Cottrel, P. Palfrader and L. Sassaman. Mixmaster Protocol-Version 2. Draft, July 2003, http://www.abditum.com/mixmaster-spec.txt.
B. Levine, M. Reiter, C. Wang and M. Wright. Timing analysis in low-latency mix-based systems. In A. Juels, editor, Financial Cryptography. Springer-Verlag, LNCS, 2004.
C. Gulcu and G. Tsudik. Mixing E-mail with Babel. In Network and Distributed Security Symposium (NDSS 96), P.2–16. IEEE, February 1996.
G. Danezis, R. Dingledine and N. Mathewson. Mixminion: Design of a type-3 anonymous remailer protocol. In 2003 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, p.2–15. IEEE CS, May 2003.
J. Helsingius. anon.penet.fi press release. http://www.penet.fi/press-english.htm.l
Cottrel. Mixmaster and remailer attacks. http://www.obscura.com/~loki/remailer/remailer-essay.html.
Jan Camenisch, Els Van Herreweghen: Design and Implementation of the Idemix Anonymous Credential System. Research Report RZ 3419, IBM Research Division, June 2002. Also appeared in ACM Computer and Communication Security 2002
Els van Herreweghen, Unidentifiability and Accountability in Electronic Transactions. PhD Thesis, KULeuven, 2004.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Naessens, V., De Decker, B., Demuynck, L. (2005). Accountable Anonymous E-Mail. In: Sasaki, R., Qing, S., Okamoto, E., Yoshiura, H. (eds) Security and Privacy in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing. SEC 2005. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 181. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-25660-1_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-25660-1_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-0-387-25658-0
Online ISBN: 978-0-387-25660-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)