Supporting Resilient, Ethical, and Verifiable Anonymous Identities Through Blockchains

Alberto De Marchi, Lorenzo Gigli, Andrea Melis, Luca Sciullo, Fabio Vitali

2025

Abstract

In recent years, anonymity on the internet has come under intense scrutiny for enabling criminal behaviors like cyberbullying, disinformation, child exploitation, and illicit financial activities. Nevertheless, strong advocates highlight its importance as a protective space for legitimate and ethical actions that individuals may prefer to keep separate from their real-world identities. This paper presents a protocol for authenticated anonymity, enabling anonymous usage that remains unlinkable to real identities unless criminal activity is detected. Blockchain offers a robust and secure framework to manage these needs. While existing solutions — e.g., self-sovereign identities — grant users full control over their disclosure, they lack proper accountability. To address this limitation, the proposed protocol employs a blockchain-driven mechanism that supports anonymous yet verifiable identities. De-anonymization is achieved exclusively through multi-party consensus on the blockchain, triggered by explicit and non-repudiable requests. We provide the formal mathematical model of the protocol and offer some evaluations of its robustness and fault tolerance, even under large-scale identity management scenarios.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

De Marchi A., Gigli L., Melis A., Sciullo L. and Vitali F. (2025). Supporting Resilient, Ethical, and Verifiable Anonymous Identities Through Blockchains. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT; ISBN 978-989-758-760-3, SciTePress, pages 777-782. DOI: 10.5220/0013657800003979

in Bibtex Style

@conference{secrypt25,
author={Alberto De Marchi and Lorenzo Gigli and Andrea Melis and Luca Sciullo and Fabio Vitali},
title={Supporting Resilient, Ethical, and Verifiable Anonymous Identities Through Blockchains},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT},
year={2025},
pages={777-782},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013657800003979},
isbn={978-989-758-760-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT
TI - Supporting Resilient, Ethical, and Verifiable Anonymous Identities Through Blockchains
SN - 978-989-758-760-3
AU - De Marchi A.
AU - Gigli L.
AU - Melis A.
AU - Sciullo L.
AU - Vitali F.
PY - 2025
SP - 777
EP - 782
DO - 10.5220/0013657800003979
PB - SciTePress