IDENTITY AND PRIVACY

Security depends on permissions, which themselves depend on the identification of the person. This is contrary to another aim in IT security: privacy. This paper investigates the aspect of controllability of identification, i.e. whether the person to be identified can prevent others from doing this, and/or restrict the information disclosed to them to what the person provides her/himself A method to "sign" stored messages, like forum posts, is presented, where authors can later on, for a self-determined time, prove identity (and therefore authorship) to interested parties and then disclose whatever information about them they desire.