Safety in Numbers: Anonymization Makes Centralized Systems Trustworthy

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how anonymization systems can enhance trustworthiness in decentralized systems by preventing operator misbehavior and ensuring data integrity without requiring database owner cooperation.

Contribution

It introduces a method to use existing anonymization systems for securing public databases against equivocation, reducing development complexity of decentralized systems.

Findings

Anonymization systems can prevent operator equivocation effectively.

Bounds on the probability of successful equivocation are derived.

Anonymization enhances trustworthiness and privacy in internet infrastructure.

Abstract

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