A New Fuzzy-Based Approach for Anonymity Quantification in E-Services

In online services, making anonymous transactions is a crucial need in order to ensure the user's trust towards a particular service. In this context, anonymity quantification is required to provide at which level the e-service respects the user privacy regarding the link between his/her identity and actions. Most of the existing researches are limited to the anonymity quantification in a static way and based, mainly, on the user's set size. In this paper, the authors propose a new multi-agent based approach for anonymity quantification in e-services considering dynamic and mobile environment's characteristics. The authors' quantification is based on the fuzzy logic. It is based not only on the anonymity set size, which is always known in advance, but also on a set of other criteria such as the number of users and the priori and posteriori knowledge about internal and external attackers of an e-service. The carried out experimentations show competitive and better results when compared to other recently proposed anonymity quantification.