# ARIBC: Online Reporting Based on Identity-Based Cryptography
## 2 Related Work  
Many law enforcement agencies around the world have online reporting systems in operation. The vast majority of these support the reporter in communicating with the agency either via e-mail or via a website. As such, they usually do not have any privacy protection controls in place, they do not support two-way communication (between the agency and the reporter), and they can only associate reporters with reports by means of a report ID, assigned to the first submitted report. This functionality may suffice for satisfying the basic needs of an agency, but more sophisticated solutions are needed to fully support the reporting process. Accordingly, several online reporting schemes, that serve diverse purposes, have been proposed in the literature, and some have been implemented and are operational. Some of these systems support anonymous reporting, whilst others require the reporters to be eponymous and to identify themselves either with the authority to which they report (e.g., the police) or to a third party (mediator); only a few schemes support both modes of reporting. An anonymous, web-based online reporting system that combines natural language processing with insights from the cognitive interview approach to obtain more information from witnesses and victims is described in [6; 7; 8]. Another anonymous reporting system was proposed for use in reporting and for following up on incidents, accidents and the like in [9]. [PERSON] et al. proposed ReportCoin, a Blockchain-based anonymous reporting system integrating an incentive mechanism [10]. The Say Something Anonymous Reporting System is a youth violence prevention program from Sandy Hook Promise, a national violence prevention organization, that allows youth and adults to submit secure and anonymous safety concerns to help identify and intervene upon individuals at-risk before they hurt themselves or others [11]. When it comes to eponymous reporting schemes, [PERSON] et al. presented a system (Cry Help App) that was developed to enable residents of a university community, situated in an environment with constrained technological resources, to facilitate secure and covert crime reporting [12]. [PERSON] et al. proposed an online illegal event reporting scheme based on cloud technology, which can process illegal activity reports from the reporting event to the issuing of a reward [13]. [PERSON] et al. in [14] described an Online Third Party Reporting System (O-TPRS) that was developed by VESTA Social Innovation Technologies [15]. A prototype crime reporting system that relies on four reporting forms, namely a complaint or dispatch reporting form; a crime event report form; a follow-up investigation report form; and an arrest report form was described in [16]. An application that can be used by citizens to report and manage their complaints effectively was proposed in [17]. A mobile infrastructure for detecting, reporting and tracking down criminal perpetrators using a mobile device was proposed in [18]. Eponymous online reporting systems commonly use a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to securely identify the reporters. Whereas eponymous systems clearly support two-way, repeated, secure communication between the reporter and the authority receiving the report, existing anonymous schemes cannot offer this functionality. Further, existing anonymous reporting systems cannot be linked to a reward process, unless a form of electronic currency (such as e.g., bitcoin) is used, as in [10]. However, this solution inherits all the limitations and downsides of such currency. The concept of a Public-key Cryptographic scheme that would use a publicly known distinctive characteristic of identity as its public key was first introduced by [PERSON] in 1984 [19]. Any type of identifier, e.g., email address, social security number, telephone number can be used, as long as it can uniquely identify the user and is readily available to the party that uses it. The corresponding private component would be generated by a trusted key generation center.