Abstract

Anonymity is a basic right and a core aspect of Internet. Recently, there has been tremendous interest in anonymity and privacy in social networks, motivated by the natural desire to share one’s opinions without the fear of judgment or personal reprisal (by parents, authorities, and the public). We propose to study the fundamental questions associated with building such a semi-distributed, anonymous messaging platform, which aims to keep anonymous the identity of the source who initially posted a message as well as the identity of the relays who approved and propagated the message.

Pramod Viswanath
Institution: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign