Aribc: Online reporting based on identity-based cryptography

Abstract

The reporting of incidents of misconduct, violence, sexual assault, harassment, and other types of crime that constitute a major concern in modern society is of significant value when investigating such incidents. Unfortunately, people involved in such incidents, either as witnesses or victims, are often reluctant to report them when such reporting demands revealing the reporter’s true identity. In this paper, we propose an online reporting system that leverages Identity-Based Cryptography (IBC) and offers data authentication, data integrity, and data confidentiality services to both eponymous and anonymous users. The system, called ARIBC, is founded on a certificate-less, public-key, IBC infrastructure, implemented by employing the Sakai–Kasahara approach and by following the IEEE 1363.3-2013 standard. We develop a proof-of-concept implementation of the proposed scheme, and demonstrate its applicability in environments with constrained human, organizational and/or computational resources. The computational overheads imposed by the scheme are found to be well within the capabilities of modern fixed or mobile devices.