The increasing diffusion of electronic services is accompanied by an increasing concern for the protection of private information. There is therefore a growing interest in the design of protocols to ensure properties like anonymity, privacy, and secrecy, as well as in the study of the formal aspects of such properties and in the development of proper tools for ensuring the correctness of these protocols.
In this project, we aim at establishing a formal framework for expressing and reasoning about information-hiding properties, for helping the design of adequate protocols, and for verifying them.
Many of these protocols use randomization to conceal the correlation between the information to be hidden and the observable events. Attackers, on the other hand, may use statistical analysis to try to infer the secret information from the observables. In order to cope with these aspects, we take a probabilistic approach. In particular, we plan to use Information Theory. We believe that the body of concepts and results related to the notion of entropy and channel's capacity will provide a natural and solid framework for our goals.
See also the original project proposal