Professor Rafael Pass’ research into online survey security and anonymity was recently featured in WIRED.
“When you use SurveyMonkey, you just have to hope that it ensures your anonymity. It’s a very dangerous assumption,” says Pass, referring to the popular online survey service. “When you ask people to tell you a lot of personal things about themselves in a non-anonymous way that could be leaked, that’s getting close to unethical.”
Pass and Shelat have built a free alternative called Anonize, designed to enable fully, cryptographically anonymous surveys. Their scheme promises that survey respondents can speak their minds with the assurance that it’s mathematically impossible for anyone, even those with access to Anonize’s servers, to identify them. And their system, which they and two other researchers presented at the IEEE Security and Privacy conference last year and have since been built into working software, still allows only a chosen group of respondents to submit answers, and only one response per person. “We set out to do these seemingly contradictory things, anonymity and accountability, without trusting a third party,” says Shelat.
Read the full article on WIRED.
