Private wars in secret life

Abstract

Intrusions into the privacy of Web users, launched on a massive scale mostly to get commercial advantage, are not only annoying, but also start to hinder the further development of the Web and its accepted commercial uses. In this paper we seek the efficient ways of implementing privacy by assuring anonymity understood as unlinkability-the impossibility to reliably correlate the visible communication with a particular user. We briefly survey the state of the art and identify the deficiencies of existing anonymity solutions. We then submit the original approach to anonymity assurance: the VAST system, which is based on a particular unlinkability notion-the impossibility to reliably correlate communication with the intentional behaviour of a particular user.