Privacy-Preserving Confidential Reporting System With Designated Reporters

Abstract A confidential reporting system (CRS) allows reporters to report concerns or problems in confidence without the fear of blame or reprisals. Nevertheless, privacy has been the primary concern of reporters. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving confidential reporting system with designated reporters (PPCRS-DR) to protect the privacy of reporters and the confidentiality of reports. Our PPCRS-DR provides the following interesting features: (1) for an event, an auditor can designate a reporter to report; (2) an auditor can neither see the report nor know the reporter’s identity from an encrypted report if the reporter is not the designated one; (3) when an auditor is unavailable, he/she can temporarily designate a delegatee to collect and review reports on behalf of him/her. We formalize both the definition and security model of our PPCRS-DR, and propose a concrete construction. Furthermore, the security of the proposed PPCRS-DR is formally proven. The implementation shows that it is efficient. The novelty is to implement flexible decryption delegation of CRSs and protect reporters’ privacy.