Towards Mathematically Modeling the Anonymity Reasoning Ability of an Adversary

With the aim to preserve privacy over a communications network, a plethora of anonymous protocols have been proposed along with many empirical investigations into specific adversary attacks over those networks. However, few formal methods have been adequately developed and applied towards anonymous systems with the goal of modeling how an adversary reasons about anonymity. Indeed, many analyses assume a passive, global adversary but fail to provide a rigorous approach to defining and modeling anonymity concepts to ensure information and data assurance as is customary when formally proving other security aspects of a system. Hence, this paper proposes the possibilistic anonymity logical model (PALM) for capturing the knowledge and reasoning ability of an adversary in an anonymous network.