Effective Anonymous Messaging: the Role of Altruism

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Frank, Marcell, Pejo, Balazs, Biczok, Gergely
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Frank, Marcell
Pejo, Balazs
Biczok, Gergely
author_facet Frank, Marcell
Pejo, Balazs
Biczok, Gergely
contents Anonymous messaging and payments have gained momentum recently due to their impact on individuals, society, and the digital landscape. Fuzzy Message Detection (FMD) is a privacy-preserving protocol where an untrusted server performs message anonymously filtering for its clients. To prevent the server from linking the sender and the receiver, the latter can set how much cover traffic they should download along with genuine messages. This could cause unwanted messages to appear on the user's end, thereby creating a need to balance one's bandwidth cost with the desired level of unlinkability. Previous work showed that FMD is not viable with selfish users. In this paper, we model and analyze FMD using the tools of empirical game theory and show that the system needs at least a few altruistic users to operate properly. Utilizing real-world communication datasets, we characterize the emerging equilibria, quantify the impact of different types and levels of altruism, and assess the efficiency of potential outcomes versus socially optimal allocations. Moreover, taking a mechanism design approach, we show how the betweenness centrality (BC) measure can be utilized to achieve the social optimum.
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
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spellingShingle Effective Anonymous Messaging: the Role of Altruism
Frank, Marcell
Pejo, Balazs
Biczok, Gergely
Computer Science and Game Theory
Networking and Internet Architecture
Anonymous messaging and payments have gained momentum recently due to their impact on individuals, society, and the digital landscape. Fuzzy Message Detection (FMD) is a privacy-preserving protocol where an untrusted server performs message anonymously filtering for its clients. To prevent the server from linking the sender and the receiver, the latter can set how much cover traffic they should download along with genuine messages. This could cause unwanted messages to appear on the user's end, thereby creating a need to balance one's bandwidth cost with the desired level of unlinkability. Previous work showed that FMD is not viable with selfish users. In this paper, we model and analyze FMD using the tools of empirical game theory and show that the system needs at least a few altruistic users to operate properly. Utilizing real-world communication datasets, we characterize the emerging equilibria, quantify the impact of different types and levels of altruism, and assess the efficiency of potential outcomes versus socially optimal allocations. Moreover, taking a mechanism design approach, we show how the betweenness centrality (BC) measure can be utilized to achieve the social optimum.
title Effective Anonymous Messaging: the Role of Altruism
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
Networking and Internet Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.14980