Building Secure Allegation Escrows
Contributor(s)
Session
Cryptography & Privacy for the People
Abstract
For fear of retribution, the victim of a crime may be willing to report it only if other victims of the same perpetrator also step forward. #metoo To handle such situations, legal literature has proposed the concept of an allegation escrow: a neutral third-party that collects allegations anonymously, matches them against each other, and de-anonymizes allegers only after de-anonymity thresholds (in terms of number of co-allegers), pre-specified by the allegers, are reached. An allegation escrow can be realized as a single trusted third party; however, this party must be trusted to keep the identity of the alleger and content of the allegation private. This talk is focus on recent cryptographic solutions that are built to address this problem. We will also discuss challenges towards building such solutions in the real world.