Usable presentation of secure pseudonyms

Privacy-Enhancing Identity Management (PIM) enables users to control which personal information they provide to their communication partner(s) by partitioning their personal information into partial identities for themselves. Since partial identities must not be linkable, they cannot share a global name. Therefore, pseudonyms are used as identifiers. We discuss in this paper that besides the frequency of their use also the (re)presentation of pseudonyms influences the achievable privacy. Particularly, we point out that conflicting requirements on privacy and usability cannot be sufficiently considered by a single type of representation of pseudonyms. Hence, a PIM system should generate digital pseudonyms which are used for communication, while users assign local mnemonics to these pseudonyms in order to simplify their use. We discuss possible solutions for the support of mnemonics and, thereby, propose some improvements to privacy-enhancing identity management tools. Categories an...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: DIM
• Authors: Katrin Borcea-Pfitzmann, Elke Franz, Andreas Pfitzmann
• Keywords: DIM 2005, Information Management, Partial Identities, Privacy-enhancing Identity Management, Pseudonyms