Dissertation

Anonymous Complaint Aggregation for Secure Messaging

Bell, Connor A

2023

Overview

Private messaging platforms provide strong protection against platform eavesdropping, but malicious users can use privacy as cover for spreading abuse and misinformation. In response, researchers have proposed mechanisms to trace back the source of a user-reported message (CCS ’19,’21). Unfortunately, the threat model considered by initial proposals allowed a single user to compromise the privacy of another user whose legitimate content the reporting user did not like. Recent work has attempted to mitigate this side effect by requiring a threshold number of users to report a message before its origins can be identified (NDSS ’22). However, the state of the art scheme requires the introduction of probabilistic data structures and only achieves a “fuzzy” threshold guarantee.This paper introduces a new threshold source tracking technique and accompanying efficient implementation that allows a private messaging platform, with the cooperation of a third-party moderator, to operate a threshold reporting scheme with exact thresholds.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Computer science / Information Technology / Web Studies
• ISBN: 9798379555030