Anonymous Certification Services

This paper describes Anonymous Communication Service (ACS), an PKI certificate service based system that permits the end user to access services offered by the service provider (SP) on the world-wide-web anonymously. ACS achieves end user anonymity by using pseudonym certificates issued to the user for the real certificates. The user can obtain multiple pseudonym certificates and use them for different transactions. Web servers or SP's are unable to determine the user's real identity or profile the user based upon the transactions. However, a user performing an illegal transaction can be revoked.