On the Economics of Anonymity

Decentralized anonymity infrastructures are still not in wide use today. While there are technical barriers to a secure robust design, our lack of understanding of the incentives to participate in such systems remains a major roadblock. Here we explore some reasons why anonymity systems are particularly hard to deploy, enumerate the incentives to participate either as senders or also as nodes, and build a general model to describe the effects of these incentives. We then describe and justify some simplifying assumptions to make the model manageable, and compare optimal strategies for participants based on a variety of scenarios.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: FC
• Authors: Alessandro Acquisti, Roger Dingledine, Paul F. Syverson
• Keywords: Anonymity Infrastructures, Compare Optimal Strategies, FC 2003, Secure Robust Design