Supporting Resilient, Ethical, and Verifiable Anonymous Identities Through Blockchains
Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: In recent years, anonymity on the internet has come under intense scrutiny for enabling criminal behaviors like cyberbullying, disinformation, child exploitation, and illicit financial activities. Nevertheless, strong advocates highlight its importance as a protective space for legitimate and ethical actions that individuals may prefer to keep separate from their real-world identities. This paper presents a protocol for authenticated anonymity, enabling anonymous usage that remains unlinkable to real identities unless criminal activity is detected. Blockchain offers a robust and secure framework to manage these needs. While existing solutions — e.g., self-sovereign identities — grant users full control over their disclosure, they lack proper accountability. To address this limitation, the proposed protocol employs a blockchain-driven mechanism that supports anonymous yet verifiable identities. De-anonymization is achieved exclusively through multi-party consensus on the blockchain, t riggered by explicit and non-repudiable requests. We provide the formal mathematical model of the protocol and offer some evaluations of its robustness and fault tolerance, even under large-scale identity management scenarios.
Authors: Alberto De Marchi, Lorenzo Gigli, Andrea Melis, Luca Sciullo, Fabio Vitali
Institutions: Universität der Bundeswehr München, University of Bologna
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4411894565