SoylentNews

AnonTechie [soylentnews.org] writes:

AT THE END of a semester teaching an undergraduate math course a few years ago, Cornell Tech researcher and crypto professor Rafael Pass asked his students to fill out the usual anonymous online course evaluation. One of his brighter students stayed after class to ask him a question: Was the survey truly anonymous? Or could someone—a determined professor or even the university’s survey service itself—dig up the identities of an individual respondent?

As a cryptographer, Pass had to confess that no, the survey wasn’t cryptographically anonymous. Students had to blindly trust that the university wouldn’t access their identifying information. “The data is there,” Pass says he admitted.

In fact, on the web, anonymous surveys usually aren’t, according to Pass and Shelat, his fellow cryptography researcher at Cornell Tech. To prevent ballot stuffing and spam responses, surveys often require a unique identifier like an email address. And the anonymity of the survey depends entirely on the survey service—or any hacker who can access its servers—choosing not to reveal the links between its supposedly anonymous responses and those identifiers.

http://www.wired.com/2015/09/new-crypto-tool-makes-anonymous-surveys-truly-anonymous/ [wired.com]

[Paper]: http://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2014/papers/ANONIZE_c_ALarge-ScaleAnonymousSurveySystem.pdf [ieee-security.org] [PDF]

Original Submission