FIDIS Deliverable 13.1: Identity and impact of Privacy Enhancing Technologies

privacy, anonymity, technology

This report brings a comprehensive review of existing technologies enhancing privacy of users, and so it lays the cornerstone of FIDIS efforts to investigate the inter-relations of various aspects of identity as studied by FIDIS and of fundamental privacy issues, namely the impact of privacy enhancing technologies. These issues are also very closely related to profiling techniques as used for, e.g., traffic analysis. While the primary goal of this report is to provide na overview of computer technologies enhancing privacy/anonymity of users, this overview will also serve as a starting point for the research of theoretical foundations that support definitions of privacy needed for its modelling and measuring - work planned for the WorkPlan 4. This future work should provide an insight to a possibly critical ability for the future - to express the level of protection/state of identity related information. Chapter two of this report presents the terminology and concepts crucial to this document. Chapter three reviews metrics that have been developed in order to assess designs providing privacypreserving properties, such as anonymity and unlinkability, and metrics for anonymized data with respect to the k-anonymity model. The fourth chapter then reviews attacker models for existing systems, together with estimates of attack impacts. Since this work will be followed by research on privacy models, we have judged is as crucial to put together a solid synthetical overview of attacks and their importance. The fifth chapter overviews most common privacy primitives and the next chapter focuses on application privacy. Finally, chapter seven discusses communication privacy in detail. This chapter concludes with general principles in computer and network systems.