Anonymity and Privacy in Distributed Early Warning Systems

As the Internet continues to emerge as a critical informa- tion infrastructure, IT early warning systems (IT-EWS) have taken on greater importance in protecting both its endpoints and the infrastruc- ture itself. Although it is generally accepted that open sharing of cyber data and warnings between the independent (but mutually vulnerable) endpoints promotes broader situational awareness, such openness intro- duces new privacy challenges. In this paper, we present a high-level model for security information sharing between autonomous operators on the Internet that enables meaningful collaboration while addressing the en- during privacy and infrastructure needs of those individual collaborators. Our concept for a collaborative and decentralised IT-EWS is based on a novel combination of existing techniques, including peer-to-peer net- working and Traceable Anonymous Certificates. We concentrate on the security and confidentiality of the data exchange platform rather than of the data itself, a separate area of research.