Anonymous Whistleblowing over Authenticated Channels

Thomas Agrikola; Geoffroy Couteau; Sven Maier

Paper 2021/1341

Anonymous Whistleblowing over Authenticated Channels

Thomas Agrikola

, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

Geoffroy Couteau

, CNRS, IRIF, Université de Paris, France

Sven Maier

, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

Abstract

The goal of anonymous whistleblowing is to publicly disclose a message while at the same time hiding the identity of the sender in a way that even if suspected of being the sender, this cannot be proven. While many solutions to this problem have been proposed over the years, they all require some form of interaction with trusted or non-colluding parties. In this work, we ask whether this is fundamentally inherent. We put forth the notion of anonymous transfer as a primitive allowing to solve this problem without relying on any participating trusted parties. We initiate the theoretical study of this question, and derive negative and positive results on the existence of such a protocol. We refute the feasibility of asymptotically secure anonymous transfer, where the message will be received with overwhelming probability while at the same time the identity of the sender remains hidden with overwhelming probability. On the other hand, resorting to fine-grained cryptography, we provide a heuristic instantiation (assuming ideal obfuscation) which guarantees that the message will be correctly received with overwhelming probability and the identity of the sender leaks with vanishing probability. Our results provide strong foundations for the study of the possibility of anonymous communications through authenticated channels, an intriguing goal which we believe to be of fundamental interest.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Foundations
Publication info: A major revision of an IACR publication in TCC 2022
Keywords: foundations whistleblowing fine-grained cryptography distribution testing undetectable computation anonymous transfer ideal obfuscation
Contact author(s): thomas agrikola @ gmail com
couteau @ irif fr
svmaier @ ira uni-karlsruhe de
History: 2022-09-15: revised; 2021-10-05: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2021/1341
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2021/1341,
      author = {Thomas Agrikola and Geoffroy Couteau and Sven Maier},
      title = {Anonymous Whistleblowing over Authenticated Channels},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2021/1341},
      year = {2021},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1341}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1341}
}