Abstract
Anonymity networks protect the metadata of communication between participants. This is an important privacy guarantee for whistleblowers, activists, journalists and others who rely on anonymity networks. However, these same guarantees can also help criminals and disruptive users evade the consequences of their actions. Existing literature and research has little to say on what designers and operators of such networks can do to maximize beneficial uses while minimizing harm. We build on lessons learned from the widespread deployment of another strong privacy technology, end-to-end encrypted messaging applications, as well as on existing examples from anonymity networks, to formulate a set of design methods which anonymity networks can use to discourage harmful use. We find better solutions exist when networks are specialized to particular application domains since such networks are then able to provide a better trade-off between benefits and harms. One drawback of such specialization is that it may lead to smaller numbers of users and therefore an increased risk of insufficient anonymity.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Laura Bechthold and Jenny Blessing for interesting discussions and valuable feedback before the workshop. In addition, the authors would like to thank all workshop participants whose questions and input helped shape this revised paper version. Daniel Hugenroth is supported by Nokia Bell Labs and the Cambridge Trust. Ceren Kocaoğullar is supported by King’s College Cambridge and the Cambridge Trust.
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Appendices
A The Tor FAQ Entry
The following is a full quote from the Abuse FAQ of the Tor project [20] retrieved on 14th February 2023.
Doesn’t Tor enable criminals to do bad things?
Criminals can already do bad things. Since they’re willing to break laws, they already have lots of options available that provide better privacy than Tor provides. They can steal cell phones, use them, and throw them in a ditch; they can crack into computers in Korea or Brazil and use them to launch abusive activities; they can use spyware, viruses, and other techniques to take control of literally millions of Windows machines around the world.
Tor aims to provide protection for ordinary people who want to follow the law. Only criminals have privacy right now, and we need to fix that.
Some advocates of anonymity explain that it’s just a tradeoff - accepting the bad uses for the good ones - but there’s more to it than that. Criminals and other bad people have the motivation to learn how to get good anonymity, and many have the motivation to pay well to achieve it. Being able to steal and reuse the identities of innocent victims (identity theft) makes it even easier. Normal people, on the other hand, don’t have the time or money to spend figuring out how to get privacy online. This is the worst of all possible worlds.
So yes, criminals can use Tor, but they already have better options, and it seems unlikely that taking Tor away from the world will stop them from doing their bad things. At the same time, Tor and other privacy measures can fight identity theft, physical crimes like stalking, and so on.
B Playing Cards
In the workshop we presented the design choices as playing cards. These are included below to serve as reference as they are mentioned in the transcribed discussion. We used OpenAI’s DALL\(\cdot \)E for generating illustrative images.
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Hugenroth, D., Kocaoğullar, C., Beresford, A.R. (2023). Choosing Your Friends: Shaping Ethical Use of Anonymity Networks. In: Stajano, F., Matyáš, V., Christianson, B., Anderson, J. (eds) Security Protocols XXVIII. Security Protocols 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14186. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43033-6_15
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