Defining and Implementing Connection Anonymity for SaaS Web Services

In this paper, we define practical schemes to protect the cloud consumer's identity (ID) during message exchanges (connection anonymity) in SaaS. We describe the typical/target scenario for service consumption and provide a detailed privacy assessment. This is used to identify different levels of interactions between consumers and providers, as well as to evaluate how privacy is affected. We propose a multi-layered anonymity framework, where different anonymity techniques are employed together to protect ID, location, behavior and data privacy, during each level of consumer-provider interaction. We also define two schemes for generating and managing anonymous credentials, which are used to implement the proposed framework. These schemes provide two options of connection anonymity: traceable (anonymity can be disclosed, if required) and untraceable (anonymity cannot be disclosed). The consumer and provider will be able to choose which is more suitable to their needs and regulatory environments.