摘要:
Presently, individuals are increasingly aware of the privacy aspects that exist in the online world. Consequently, communication systems are working towards providing users with solutions that solve their privacy concerns. To solve this need, companies started deploying systems that provide end-to-end encryption, which allow the content of the communications to be restricted only to users involved in a particular communication channel. However, a paradox emerges: a truly privacy-preserving communication mechanism should not be able to construct the social graphs of users, since they expose a tremendous amount of personal information associated with each individual. Nevertheless, simultaneously, a communi- cation application needs to be able to map the users registered in the system, so that they are able to find and communicate with each other. This thesis presents an analysis and implementation of a new Private User Discovery protocol designed to solve the leakage of information present in the social graph of users. Fundamen- tally, the PrivaTegrity User Discovery protocol provides a mechanism that allows any two users to establish a private channel of communication if both users have the corresponding public con- tact information for each other. As such, the PrivaTegrity User Discovery protocol assumes two different types of contact identifiers for every user in the system. Users need both a public con- tact identifier -such as an email address- and a private contact identifier, a cMix ID, which is exclusive to the PrivaTegrity system. In addition, the PrivaTegrity User Discovery protocol does not upload any cleartext contact information associated with the PrivaTegrity system (i. e., cMix ID). Instead, the protocol combines cryptographic key agreement techniques in a manner that the server, responsible for mapping multiple users to each other, only processes hashed and encrypted information, thus being unable of constructing any type of social graph. However, thi