[privacydir] Privacy Terminology: What are useful terms?

Hannes Tschofenig <hannes.tschofenig@gmx.net> Tue, 05 July 2011 10:49 UTC

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From: Hannes Tschofenig <hannes.tschofenig@gmx.net>
Date: Tue, 05 Jul 2011 13:48:59 +0300
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Subject: [privacydir] Privacy Terminology: What are useful terms?
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Hi all, 

You may have seen that the privacy terminology document over time got shorter and shorter as I removed content to make it more readable. Here is the latest version: 
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hansen-privacy-terminology-02

It is still too long. Most IETF document authors are likely to use only a few terms. 

In a recent discussion in the IAB privacy program we were wondering what are the terms we absolutely need to have. Here are the terms I think could be useful for IETF document authors to know. 

1) Anonymity
2) Unlinkability
3) Unobservability
4) Pseudonym/Pseudonymity

Anonymity, unlinkability and pseudonymity are useful terms for many of the IETF's authentication protocols. The sub-categories of sender anonymity and relationship anonymity are more applicable to protocols like onion routing proposals. 
Unobservability shows up in the context of security protocols where dummy traffic is used to pad exchanged data.

Identity management is often touched in the work on architectures. While many of the entities have their own unique terms with each proposal there are some concepts that seem to be quite generic, such as 'identity', and 'identifier'. It may be useful to capture this aspect as well. 

From your experience, what other terminology is useful to have? 

Ciao
Hannes