Paper
Revisiting the Naming Problem from a Privacy Perspective
- Authors:
- Andreas Pfitzmann; Elke Franz; Katrin Borcea-Pfitzmann
- Abstract
- The problem of naming objects has been studied intensively for some years. Suggested properties of names ensure that they can unambiguously designate objects, i.e., the mapping between names and objects is unique, and that human beings are able to remember names. However, especially in the case of assigning names to human beings, names may constitute a threat to the privacy of the name holders as they often expose additional information about the named object. The first contribution of this paper is a thorough analysis of the privacy aspects in the given setting which leads to adding a supplemental property related to privacy: names used for designating human beings should be privacy-friendly, unique, and memorable. We point out that we have to use at least two clearly separated types of names to fulfill these requirements. Since the separation is crucial particularly for the property “privacy-friendly”, this paper defines a naming system that comprehensively supports users in managing names. The second contribution of the paper is a discussion of the implementation of the suggested concept: we describe assumptions as well as required functionality of such a system and discuss security aspects as well as specifics related to the implementation.
- Keywords
- Naming Scheme; Privacy; Unlinkability; Pseudonyms; Mnemonics; Privacy-enhancing Identity Management
- StartPage
- 29
- EndPage
- 35
- Doi