Safety in Numbers: Anonymization Makes Centralized Systems Trustworthy
This work addresses the problem of making centralized systems trustworthy for developers and users, offering a novel application of anonymization beyond privacy.
The paper tackles the challenge of securing centralized systems against operator equivocation by leveraging existing anonymization systems, demonstrating that this approach reduces the probability of successful equivocation with derived bounds.
Decentralized systems can be more resistant to operator mischief than centralized ones, but they are substantially harder to develop, deploy, and maintain. This cost is dramatically reduced if the decentralized part of the system can be made highly generic, and thus incorporated into many different applications. We show how existing anonymization systems can serve this purpose, securing a public database against equivocation by its operator without the need for cooperation by the database owner. We derive bounds on the probability of successful equivocation, and in doing so, we demonstrate that anonymization systems are not only important for user privacy, but that by providing privacy to machines they have a wider value within the internet infrastructure