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Blockchain development has expanded amazing thought, with an elevating eagerness for a lot of different applications, running from data the administrators, cash-related organizations, advanced cybersecurity, Internet of Things (IoT), and sustenance science to social protection industry and psyche inspect. The board has identified a stunning interest in using blockchain work opportunities for the transfer of sealed and secure social protection data. Already, there is a blockchain that is improving the standard social insurance practices to a legitimately solid recommendation, like successful end and treatment through guaranteed and secure information sharing. Later on, blockchain could be improved, which may conceivably help in changed, authentic, and secure remedial administrations by consolidating the whole consistent clinical information of a patient's prosperity and introducing it in a top-tier secure medical organizations course of the plan. In this work, we study both the present and most recent updates in the field of medical organizations by acknowledging blockchain as a model. We, in addition, talk about the employments of blockchain, near to the difficulties opposed and future points of view. The biggest problem connected with blockchain is a lack of technical knowledge. Trust is built in the network and blockchain invention, and less in the individual participants or the sharing of accomplices. High structure and operational consistency thus maintain the namelessness and pseudonymity of the participants. It reduces the lopsided characteristics of power, and the man handles and the arbitrary decisions. more...

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are becoming the most promising research topic in intelligent transportation systems, because they provide information to deliver comfort and safety to both drivers and passengers. However, unique characteristics of VANETs make security, privacy, and trust management challenging issues in VANETs’ design. This survey article starts with the necessary background of VANETs, followed by a brief treatment of main security services, which have been well studied in other fields. We then focus on an in-depth review of anonymous authentication schemes implemented by five pseudonymity mechanisms. Because of the predictable dynamics of vehicles, anonymity is necessary but not sufficient to thwart tracking an attack that aims at the drivers’ location profiles. Thus, several location privacy protection mechanisms based on pseudonymity are elaborated to further protect the vehicles’ privacy and guarantee the quality of location-based services simultaneously. We also give a comprehensive analysis on various trust management models in VANETs. Finally, considering that current and near-future applications in VANETs are evaluated by simulation, we give a much-needed update on the latest mobility and network simulators as well as the integrated simulation platforms. In sum, this paper is carefully positioned to avoid overlap with existing surveys by filling the gaps and reporting the latest advances in VANETs while keeping it self-explained. more...

A recurring theme in the study of unethical and harmful behavior is disconnection . And therefore perhaps it is no surprise that when individuals view themselves as a separate entity, they can loosen or even lose their moral compass. This phenomenon is known as the avatar effect. The experiment reported here explores the avatar effect in online communities. It explores whether participants adopt the suggested traits of a given entity when they communicate via that entity. The results revealed that participants' youtube comments were significantly influenced by their username and profile image, despite being asked to give their own opinion. The paper offers further insight into the growing field of disconnecting agents and compromised ethics. more...

Regarding the problem of self-knowledge in Kierkegaard’s philosophy, it is common to relate it to the discussion of despair in Anti-Climacus’s The Sickness Unto Death but not to the limit of reason in Climacus’s Philosophical Fragments. Indeed, it is possible to see both the limit of reason and despair as the failure of self-knowledge and how these two works complement each other in discussing such problem through the cases of Socrates. These two works share the view that the failure of self-knowledge is due to the misrelation between oneself and the divine. Moreover, an entry from Anti-Climacus puts himself and Climacus as a pair of dialectical twins who share the common concern on “how to be a genuine Christian”. So this dissertation aims to demonstrate the dialectical complementary relationship between Climacus’s Fragments and Anti-Climacus’s Sickness, by illustrating that paradoxical rationality (the mutual relationship between reason and paradox) is necessary to overcome the failure of self-knowledge. In addition, this dissertation suggests the potential in examining the dialectical reading between Climacus and Anti-Climacus that is commonly neglected among current studies. more...

Kharlamov claims that the choice of Dionysius of the Areopagus as the author “is quite a risky plan if the actual author wanted to present the corpus as an original production,” that it “could be easily established as forgery,” and that the choice of an author who did not leave a written work would have been “more disadvantageous” (48). What do we learn about the CD in this reading? C. Stang (Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012]) and C. Schafer (“The Anonymous Naming of Names: Pseudonymity and Philosophical Program in Dionysius the Areopagite,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 82.4 [2008]: 561–80), who focus on Paul, develop some interesting facets of the CD. A female author, perhaps, would be less interested in building predominantly male hierarchies and attempting to squeeze the whole universe into a coherent system. more...

How and when do people participate in sustained collective action via the courts? Previous research highlights group identity or resources and political opportunities but overlooks civil procedural rules’ effects beyond the courtroom. This article explores how rules regarding privacy shape individuals’ decisions about sustained participation. Fears of exposing one’s identity deter participation, especially in the context of public trials. Yet, a paired comparison of litigation by victims of hepatitis C-tainted blood products in Japan and Korea reveals that court-supervised privacy protections, which were available in Japan but not in Korea, facilitate plaintiffs’ participation inside and outside the courtroom. They ease plaintiff recruitment and enhance claimants’ credibility. Counterintuitively, they also let claimants strategically shed pseudonymity to send a costly signal about their commitment to the cause. Theorizing “pseudonymous participation” as an understudied mode of activism between full exposure and anonymity demonstrates that seemingly technical aspects of law have significant political consequences. more...

The decentralized digital currency Bitcoin presents an anonymous alternative to the centralized banking system and indeed enjoys widespread and increasing adoption. Recent works, however, show how users can be reidentified and their payments linked based on Bitcoins most central element, the blockchain, a public ledger of all transactions. Thus, many regard Bitcoins central promise of financial privacy as broken.In this paper, we propose CoinParty, an efficient decentralized mixing service that allows users to reestablish their financial privacy in Bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies. CoinParty, through a novel combination of decryption mixnets with threshold signatures, takes a unique place in the design space of mixing services, combining the advantages of previously proposed centralized and decentralized mixing services in one system. Our prototype implementation of CoinParty scales to large numbers of users and achieves anonymity sets by orders of magnitude higher than related work as we quantify by analyzing transactions in the actual Bitcoin blockchain. CoinParty can easily be deployed by any individual group of users, i.e.,independent of any third parties, or provided as a commercial or voluntary service, e.g.,as a community service by privacy-aware organizations. We present ideal properties for mixing of digital currencies.We propose a novel efficient decentralized mixing service for Bitcoin.A novel oblivious shuffle protocol improves resilience against malicious attackers.Use of threshold cryptography increases anonymity and enables deniability.The system is usable, scalable and compatible with Bitcoin/other digital currencies. more...

New Testament scholars continue to debate the number of missing ‘particles’ in disputed Pauline letters in order to advocate or challenge their pseudonymity. Surprisingly, however, participants in the debate do not usually define particles nor do they explain how they count missing types. Addressing these methodological issues, the present study suggests using the broader category of ‘indeclinables’ instead of particles, and to count missing types by either comparing the data for a particular letter (or group of letters) against another letter (or group of letters) or in light of the entire Pauline letter corpus. Since the overall result proves to be different for both approaches, it appears that the question regarding the number of missing indeclinables in (pseudo-)Pauline literature is essentially one of method. more...

Private set intersection (PSI) allows two parties to compute the intersection of their sets without revealing any information about items that are not in the intersection. It is one of the best studied applications of secure computation and many PSI protocols have been proposed. However, the variety of existing PSI protocols makes it difficult to identify the solution that performs best in a respective scenario, especially since they were not compared in the same setting. In addition, existing PSI protocols are several orders of magnitude slower than an insecure naïve hashing solution, which is used in practice. In this article, we review the progress made on PSI protocols and give an overview of existing protocols in various security models. We then focus on PSI protocols that are secure against semi-honest adversaries and take advantage of the most recent efficiency improvements in Oblivious Transfer (OT) extension, propose significant optimizations to previous PSI protocols, and suggest a new PSI protocol whose runtime is superior to that of existing protocols. We compare the performance of the protocols, both theoretically and experimentally, by implementing all protocols on the same platform, give recommendations on which protocol to use in a particular setting, and evaluate the progress on PSI protocols by comparing them to the currently employed insecure naïve hashing protocol. We demonstrate the feasibility of our new PSI protocol by processing two sets with a billion elements each. more...

Private communication detection (PCD) is a traffic-analysis technique whereby an ordinary user of a communication network exploits side channels in end-point devices to observe the busy/idle activity status of targeted users. Correlations of users’ activity status allows collection of communication records that reveal private relationships. PCD techniques have been demonstrated for a number of communication technologies, such as Wi-Fi and VoIP, and their effectiveness shown even when the communication network is private; i.e., it provides content confidentiality, flow anonymity, and user pseudonymity. In this paper, we present a mathematical model of PCD that captures the activity status of two targets in a private VoIP network, including the probing process of an attacker that aims to breach their communication anonymity. Using this model, we a) develop fundamental bounds on PCD accuracy; b) measure the anonymity leakage in terms of the amount of call record information obtained in an attack; and c) provide performance guarantees and compare the efficacy of different PCD countermeasures, such as resource randomization and use of firewalls. more...

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) has been regarded as an important enabling technology for future intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Safety-critical applications in V2X require authentication of nodes and messages, and also need to preserve the privacy of vehicles. Pseudonymity plays an important role in V2X communication by satisfying both security and privacy requirements. In this paper, we analyze the weaknesses of a recent relevant work named Issue First Activate Later (IFAL), which is the leading European candidate for V2X. We then propose a novel lightweight, secure and privacy-preserving pseudonym changing scheme. Through the security analysis, we show that the proposed scheme achieves the asynchronous key agreement, and realizes both robust forward secrecy and backward secrecy while keeping security functionalities of IFAL. Furthermore, the performance analysis is conducted on Arduino Mega 2560 to illustrate that the proposed scheme is feasible and practical. © 2014 xxxxxxxx. Hosting by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. more...

This article traces the development of Internet communication by examining online names and pseudonyms. I argue that choosing a username, as the first interaction a person has with a platform, sets... more...

Why did Sethian gnostic authors write pseudonymously? In addition to making a claim to authority, gnostic pseudepigraphy, exemplified by The Three Tablets of Seth, was multiple and performative, implying that the self is multiple—a manifestation of selfhood at different levels of a single reality—and that performing one’s self as multiple provides a path to higher knowledge of one’s self and thus of God. That is, gnostic pseudonymity stems from a distinctive understanding of the self and functions as a mystical practice that performs that understanding. The eschewal of pseudonymity in Valentinian literature reflects different conceptions of the self and of the path to gnosis. more...

Authors and performers use pseudonyms in order to distance themselves from their works and performances. Pseudonymity protects expressive, creative, privacy and reputational interests. In this arti... more...

This article explores the tensions apparent in anonymous military online forums as sites of publicly visible yet discursively intimate performances of military identity and sites of distinct power relations. This article draws on data collected from British military forums and the organisations that own and manage them. We consider the discursive online practices within the forums and the extent to which the technological affordances of ‘anonymity’ (or what we define as pseudonymity) act as a critical interface between the military community who contribute to the content and non-military observers who read, access, mine and appropriate the content. In so doing, we raise critical questions about the nature of ‘anonymity’ and the complex tensions in and negotiations of private and public, visibility and invisibility that occur through it and the framing and monetising of particular online communities for economic and political purpose. more...

The perspective on the Pastoral Epistles presented in this paper differs from the established scholarly consensus and moves beyond the controversy concerning pseudonymity versus authenticity. After examining the development of the ‘Corpus Pastorale’ theory and clarifying some methodological questions, the paper argues for an interpretation of the Pastorals separately from each other and in their specific relation to Paul and his tradition. Significant examples indicate the possibility of understanding 2 Timothy and Titus as authentic letters of Paul, whereas 1 Timothy proves to belong to the second centuryce. From this perspective, many otherwise contradictory aspects of the history of interpretation regain their rationale. more...

With the rapid increase of threats on the Internet, people are continuously seeking privacy and anonymity. Services such as Bitcoin and Tor were introduced to provide anonymity for online transactions and Web browsing. Due to its pseudonymity model, Bitcoin lacks retroactive operational security, which means historical pieces of information could be used to identify a certain user. We investigate the feasibility of deanonymizing users of Tor hidden services who rely on Bitcoin as a payment method by exploiting public information leaked from online social networks, the Blockchain, and onion websites. This, for example, allows an adversary to link a user with @alice Twitter address to a Tor hidden service with private.onion address by finding at least one past transaction in the Blockchain that involves their publicly declared Bitcoin addresses. To demonstrate the feasibility of this deanonymization attack, we carried out a real-world experiment simulating a passive, limited adversary. We crawled 1.5K hidden services and collected 88 unique Bitcoin addresses. We then crawled 5B tweets and 1M BitcoinTalk forum pages and collected 4.2K and 41K unique Bitcoin addresses, respectively. Each user address was associated with an online identity along with its public profile information. By analyzing the transactions in the Blockchain, we were able to link 125 unique users to 20 Tor hidden services, including sensitive ones, such as The Pirate Bay and Silk Road. We also analyzed two case studies in detail to demonstrate the implications of the resulting information leakage on user anonymity. In particular, we confirm that Bitcoin addresses should always be considered exploitable, as they can be used to deanonymize users retroactively. This is especially important for Tor hidden service users who actively seek and expect privacy and anonymity. more...

Tributing is the practice of sending a sexually explicit photo adorned in ejaculate to the subject of the photo. It involves an entanglement of screens, online identities, platforms, affect, materiality, and bodily fluids and plays out in a particular way on bulletin board Reddit. This article draws on two week-long archives of the subreddit TributeMe to study the way affective exchanges are intensified by the circulation of digital images. I draw on the way affect pertains to movement to argue that tributes express affect moving in two ways: through the body, with the ejaculation evidencing arousal and standing in for a physical encounter, and through social media platforms, with images being circulated as digital objects. Although the strict verification system involves providing consent for the image to be tributed, people deliberately remain pseudonymous on TributeMe. This is a strategy to compartmentalize their involvement in TributeMe so it does not appear as a publicly accessible digital trace. The pseudonymity of TributeMe allows people to engage in sexualized affective exchanges in public. more...

Social media visibility has made feminists and feminism increasingly vulnerable to interference and surveillance. This chapter charts how men are using social media to shape and influence feminist organising. I argue that, despite the various tactics adopted by activists to try to create women-only space on social media (such as closed/private Facebook groups, content moderation and anonymity/pseudonymity), a male presence is inescapable. Women’s attention remains focussed upon trying to keep themselves safe from men, and many activists self-surveil in an attempt to avoid abuse. In this chapter, I explore how digital space offers men increased opportunities to intervene in and police feminist debates, locate and watch feminist activity and harass individual activists, raising new challenges for women’s autonomous political organising. more...

This research project focuses on the impacts exerted by the tech schemes behind virtual currencies on the EU framework to prevent the misuse of the financial system and it aims to explore legal challenges posed in the IoM landscape by the double-edged nature of DLTs as both transparency and privacy-oriented. On the one hand, it plans to identify effective legislative and regulatory measures to ensure crypto account- ability from an AML/CFT standpoint, as well as to assess the relevant role of pseudonymity. On the other hand, it pursues to discover inno- vative legal approaches to secure AML/CFT active cooperation in the crypto ecosystem(s), to the end of mitigating anonymity and traceability concerns while respecting both the value of publicity and transparency in the law and the conceptual origin of the crypto economy. ispartof: pages:1-15 ispartof: Proceedings of the 2019 JURIX Doctoral Consortium (JURIX-DC-2019) vol:2598 pages:1-15 ispartof: 2019 JURIX Doctoral Consortium (JURIX-DC-2019) location:Madrid, Spain date:11 Dec - 11 Dec 2019 status: Published online more...

Voting is a very important issue that can be beneficial in terms of choosing the right leader in an election. A good leader can bring prosperity to a country and also can lead the country in the right direction every time. However, elections are surrounded by ballot forgery, coercion, and multiple voting issues. Moreover, while giving votes, a person has to wait in a long queue and it is a very time-consuming process. Blockchain is a distributed database in which data are shared with the participant of the node and each participant holds the same copy of the data. Blockchain has properties like transparency, pseudonymity, and data integrity. In this paper, a fully decentralized e-voting system based on blockchain technology is proposed. This protocol utilizes smart contracts in the e-voting system to deal with security issues, accuracy, and voters’ privacy during the vote. The protocol results in a transparent, non-editable, and independently verifiable procedure. The protocol discards all the intended fraudulent activities occurring during the election process by removing the least participation of the third party. Both transparency and coercion are obtained at the same time. more...

For years now the hype surrounding block-chain as a new and more decentralized architecture to facilitate transactions has led people to search for cases of application for this emerging technology. Before thematizing the hype that has been propelling block-chain on the global stage, it is useful to mention the main novelty that block-chain brings: authentication of uniqueness of data in digital settings or “native authentication,” i.e. without relying on an external/non-digital intermediary. Without this property, it could not be used for digital currency, which, of course, must be unforgeable. Other relevant, and related properties are: decentralization (even if no unique guarantor is often substituted by clusters of miners), immutability (records cannot be deleted), auditability (mathematically provable), and pseudonymity (via key-pair identification). more...

The recent SARS-CoV-2 pandemic gave rise to management approaches using mobile apps for contact tracing. The corresponding apps track individuals and their interactions, to facilitate alerting users of potential infections well before they become infectious themselves. Naive implementation obviously jeopardizes the privacy of health conditions, location, activities, and social interaction of its users. A number of protocol designs for colocation tracking have already been developed, most of which claim to function in a privacy preserving manner. However, despite claims such as “GDPR compliance”, “anonymity”, “pseudonymity” or other forms of “privacy”, the authors of these designs usually neglect to precisely define what they (aim to) protect. We make a first step towards formally defining the privacy notions of proximity tracing services, especially with regards to the health, (co-)location, and social interaction of their users. We also give a high-level intuition of which protection the most prominent proposals likely can and cannot achieve. This initial overview indicates that all proposals include some centralized services, and none protects identity and (co-)locations of infected users perfectly from both other users and the service provider. more...

There are a large number of movies, TV series, novels, short stories, and even plays about cybersecurity and, in particular, about hackers. Some are good, some are so-so, most are frankly quite bad. Some are realistic, most make cybersecurity experts cringe. In this paper, I discuss how a number of basic cybersecurity notions (and even several advanced ones) can be explained with the help of some well-known popular movies and other artworks, and some perhaps less obvious ones. I focus in particular on anonymity, pseudonymity, and authentication, but similar explanations can be given for other security properties, for the algorithms, protocols, and systems that have been developed to achieve such properties, and for the vulnerabilities and attacks that they suffer from. more...