[freehaven-dev] formalizing anonymity

[Roger R Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

it occurred to me today that we have a pretty good idea of a formal
definition of anonymity. we've got four aspects to our definition:

* Publisher-anonymity: the publisher of a given document should not be known
* Client-anonymity (request-anonymity?): clients requesting a document
  should not have to identify themselves to anyone
* Location-anonymity: the current location of the document should not be
  known or knowable
* Foo-anonymity: it is not provable that a document was ever stored on a
  given host

clearly we'd need a better word for 'foo'. possibilities include history,
path, trail, fence and perfect forward, none of which seems to be the best
one imo. (tho i kind of like the phrase 'perfect forward anonymity'...)

anyway, free haven offers the first three. freenet offers the first one.
rewebbers offer #1 and #3.
pretty cool to be able to quantify this a bit, eh?
hey david: have people written papers about this, or should i write this
up using capital letters and real grammar? :)

--roger