Toward a software development methodology for anonymity applications

There are some software applications especially in privacy protection domain which they need anonymity support. Therefore lots of methods and protocols have been presented so far for providing this requirement. However no specific software development methodology has been yet provided for specification of anonymity requirements and consideration of anonymity as part of software design and implementation life cycle. In this paper we present a methodology for development of anonymity applications. The proposed methodology consists of three relevant phases named AnoModel, AnoUML, and AnoAPI. Requirement analysis and specification is based on AnoModel which is a conceptual model of anonymity. Also design and implementation phases are partially covered by AnoUML (which is an extension of UML for supporting anonymity design elements) and AnoAPI (which is a programming interface for implementing anonymity primitives) respectively. To show the applicability of the proposed methodology, two case studies of using it are presented.