Information Technology Reference
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discloses his pseudonym. Since he wants to receive his prize, he will be coopera-
tive and will not try to forge the disclosed identity.
Online Retrieval of Information:
By correlating the different areas, where
a certain person retrieves information (e.g. patents or conference papers), one
may conclude the research topic (and the state of the research) of this person.
Applying pseudonyms (actually anonyms) here, would solve the problem.
Electronic Voting:
Here, the voter may use his unique identifier received dur-
ing the setup phase of the voting scheme to choose his pseudonym locally. Unfor-
tunately, by now there is no way to prove the binding between the identifier and
the pseudonym without disclosing the pseudonym. Nevertheless, this approach
may be useful within closed systems, where each participant in the system is a
legitimate voter.
Other applications may be in the field of online-subscription of newspapers
or temporary identifiers in the scope of mobile phones or RFID (radio frequency
identification).
2
Generation of Pseudonyms
The method presented in this paper is based on the idea of generating unique
keys (or key components like primes) within isolated instances [3] which has been
refined in [4,5,6,14]. Figure 1 shows the operating principle of the original scheme.
Here, we first generate unique identifiers (
EID
1
||
k
1
respectively
EID
2
||
k
2
)by
means of symmetric encryption, where
EID
=E
k
(
UID
PAD
). The
proof of uniqueness will be given later on in this paper. These identifiers are
concatenated with some bits (
PP
1
respectively
PP
2
) in order to generate proba-
bilistic primes. Finally, the primes are multiplied and the result gives the unique
modulus of an RSA-Crypto-System consisting of two unique primes
p
1
and
p
2
.
||
Data
||
UID
||
Data
1
||
PAD
1
k
1
UID
||
Data
2
||
PAD
2
k
2
E
E
EID
1
k
1
PP
1
EID
2
k
2
PP
2
Prime
p
1
Prime
p
2
Modulus
n
=
p
1
ยท
p
2
Fig. 1.
Basic Idea - Generation of Unique Key Components
