An Epistemic Approach to Compositional Reasoning about Anonymity and Privacy [article]

Yasuyuki Tsukada, Hideki Sakurada, Ken Mano, Yoshifumi Manabe
2013 arXiv   pre-print
In this paper, we present an epistemic logic approach to the compositionality of several privacy-related informationhiding/ disclosure properties. The properties considered here are anonymity, privacy, onymity, and identity. Our initial observation reveals that anonymity and privacy are not necessarily sequentially compositional; this means that even though a system comprising several sequential phases satisfies a certain unlinkability property in each phase, the entire system does not always
more » ... joy a desired unlinkability property. We show that the compositionality can be guaranteed provided that the phases of the system satisfy what we call the independence assumptions. More specifically, we develop a series of theoretical case studies of what assumptions are sufficient to guarantee the sequential compositionality of various degrees of anonymity, privacy, onymity, and/or identity properties. Similar results for parallel composition are also discussed.
arXiv:1310.6441v1 fatcat:z642mjcgtffopblru6zppctggm