AAA: A blockchain-based architecture for ethical, robust authenticated anonymity

In the past years, online anonymity has attracted strong criticism for its role in shielding online crimes such as cyberbullying, fake news, money laundering, and pedo-pornography. Yet, it also has historically strong supporters who emphasize the necessity of a safe haven for carrying out legal and ethical activities that should not be associated with our real-life personas. We define authenticated anonymity as the possibility of using anonymous accounts that cannot be associated with the real identity of their owner unless a criminal act is being performed through them. Blockchain technology represents a good means for managing this complexity in a secure and trustworthy manner. Several solutions exist in the literature and on the market for anonymous identity, but they confer too much power to their owners, who can decide what to reveal about themselves in total autonomy (self-sovereign identities). In this paper, we present the Authenticated Anonymity Architecture (AAA), a blockchain-based solution for creating authenticated anonymous identities, where the mappings between official and anonymous identities can only be revealed after the necessary consensus of multiple different actors on the blockchain, evaluating the appropriateness and ethicality of the request. We mathematically modeled the architecture and conducted some analytical evaluations, showing that our proposal is resilient and fault-tolerant, even in the case of a huge number of identities managed.