Anonymity in PKI Environment

PKI provides an infrastructure of the more general security service for the electronic commerce and the electronic government affairs, but the users in the network still suffer from the traffic analysis attacks by leaking the link information of the communication such as the identity of the user, the time of the communication and the direction of the traffic flow, etc. The anonymity technique provides the mechanism to implement one subject to be the state of not being identifiable within a set of subjects. This paper aims to import the anonymity technique to the PKI environment and proposes a scheme to implement anonymous communication based on the PKI. With the methods of secret splitting, revising of the process of certificate generation and importing role control in the certificate, it is able to trace the abuser of the anonymity while protecting the privacy of the normal users. Besides, this scheme implements the trade-off between the anonymity and the communication efficiency by combining the virtues of the DC-Nets and Mix-Nets.