Perfect Anonymity

For 35 years, the cryptographic community has created the impression that anonymous communication is always possible. Chaum's dining cryptographer's solution is regarded as achieving unconditional security. Chaum's MIX approach, namely, applying a uniformly random permutation on the plaintexts to be sent, is often given as a definition for anonymity. However, people working in law enforcement know that attempts by whistle-blowers and criminals to remain at large, often fail. The content of the message may reveal the name of the sender or may leak for whom the message is really intended. To understand this issue, we give a definition of perfect anonymity. We contrast our definition with Chaum's approach and discuss the impact on Chaum's dining cryptographer's solution.