A novel method to communicate in anonymous social networks

The trend of anonymous messaging, social networking, and general communication applications (e.g. Whisper, Secret, etc.) has been gaining traction recently. This stems from a growing need among internet users for speaking and communicating freely, without associating their content with their identities. However, in all the existing applications, anonymity is guaranteed by the server managing the network, where the users’ messages have to go directly through the server before they are anonymously shared with the selected audience. In the light of the recent revelations on mass surveillance, the general trust in servers to guarantee users’ privacy has been diminishing. Hence, we develop a technique for making such types of communications anonymous to both the server and the intended audience. Such a technique guarantees that the server would not know that a certain message came from a specific person. We term the technique, Scheme of Trusted Users. The scheme is implemented using Java SE.