Anonymized User Identifier Generation for Bot Collusion Prevention
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Solution Overview
Problem
The challenge lies in preventing collusion between third-party bots in communication systems, particularly in scenarios where user privacy is at risk without informed consent, as existing systems lack effective mechanisms to manage user identities and prevent unauthorized data sharing.
Innovation Solution
A communication system acts as a trusted intermediary, using anonymized user identifiers encrypted with bot-specific secrets, ensuring that each bot receives a unique identifier for the same user, preventing matching across bots and maintaining user privacy by not storing lookup tables for anonymized identifiers, thus reducing storage requirements.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If the communication system releases user identifiers to multiple bots, then each bot can identify and interact with the user, but bots can collude by matching user identifiers across different users
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments the user identifier into bot-specific portions. Each bot receives a unique segment (anonymized user identifier) that is tailored to that specific bot, preventing bots from matching identifiers across different users while maintaining the ability to identify and interact with authorized users.
Solution Approach 2:
The communication system acts as an intermediary between users and bots. It generates and manages bot-specific anonymized user identifiers, serving as a trusted mediator that prevents direct exposure of real user identifiers to bots and blocks collusion by ensuring each bot sees only its unique identifier segment.
2Reliability
If the communication system stores lookup tables for anonymized identifiers, then it can manage user-bot mappings, but storage requirements increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The system extracts only the essential mapping information needed for each bot interaction, storing bot-specific anonymized user identifiers directly in message transmissions rather than maintaining comprehensive lookup tables. This extracts the minimum necessary data from a potential full mapping structure, reducing storage requirements while maintaining reliability.
3Object-affected harmful factors
If the system uses encrypted user identifiers for each bot, then user privacy is protected, but the complexity of managing bot-specific encryption increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system applies different anonymization characteristics to different bots. Each bot receives user identifiers with quality and properties tailored to that specific bot's needs and security requirements, rather than applying a uniform anonymization approach across all bots. This local quality approach protects user privacy while managing complexity through targeted, bot-specific anonymization strategies.
Data Source
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AI summary
A computer system comprises computer storage holding a plurality of code modules, one or more processors and a communication system. The one or more processors are configured to execute the code modules and thereby implement the bots. The communication system comprises a message relay and an anonymized identifier generator. The message relay is configured to receive a message comprising an identifier of a user and an identifier of a target one of the bots. The anonymized identifier generator is configured to generate an anonymized identifier of the user unique to the target bot, by applying an anonymization function to the user identifier and the bot identifier in the message. The message relay is configured to transmit to the target bot a version of the message, which comprises the anonymized user identifier and does not include the user identifier, wherein the user identifier is not rendered accessible to the target bot.