Efficient Anonymous Message Submission

In online surveys, many people are not willing to provide true answers due to privacy concerns. Thus, anonymity is important for online message collection. Existing solutions let each member blindly shuffle the submitted messages by using the IND-CCA2 secure cryptosystem. In the end, all messages are randomly shuffled and no one knows the message order. However, the heavy computational overhead and linear communication rounds make it only useful for small groups. In this paper, we propose an efficient anonymous message submission protocol aimed at a practical group size. Our protocol is based on a simplified secret sharing scheme and a symmetric key cryptosystem. We propose a novel method to let all members secretly aggregate their messages into a message vector such that a member knows nothing about other members' message positions. We provide a theoretical proof showing that our protocol is anonymous under malicious attacks. We then conduct a thorough analysis of our protocol, showing that our protocol is computationally more efficient than existing solutions and results in a constant communication rounds with a high probability.