Anonymity

Synonyms

Namelessness; Nonidentifiability

Definition

The term anonymity originates from the Greek word “anonymia,” which means “without a name.”

In the context of computing, anonymity has been defined in [2] as follows: “Anonymity of a subject means that the subject is not identifiable within a set of subjects, the anonymity set.” The anonymity set is the set of all possible subjects, e.g., the set of all possible senders of a message or the set of all possible recipients of a message (dependent on the knowledge of an attacker). Sender anonymity means that a message cannot be linked to the sender, while receiver anonymityimplies that a certain message cannot be linked to the receiver of that message. Relationship anonymity of a sender and recipient means that even though a sender and a recipient can be identified as participating in some communication, they cannot be identified as communicating with each other, i.e., sender and recipient are unlinkable. The definition above...