# ARIBC: Online Reporting Based on Identity-Based Cryptography
## 1 Introduction  
Incidents, such as misconduct, violence, sexual assault, harassment, and other types of crime occur frequently in social circumstances, such as in educational institutions at all levels or the workplace; such incidents constitute a major concern in modern society.  
The reporting of such incidents is of significant value for both investigating the incident itself, and for recognizing potential problems before they evolve into serious incidents. However, difficulties exist in encouraging observers to make the incidents known to the competent authority on one hand, and in handling the reports on the other. Witnesses and victims alike are frequently reluctant to report an incident due to a number of reasons, including fear of retaliation by the perpetrator(s), fear of not being believed, insecurity, and fear of getting into trouble. As a result, a significant percentage of incidents go unreported; this is particularly the case with sexual assault and property theft crimes [1]. Further, when an observer does report an incident, they frequently do so more than once, in particular during the investigation process. Thus, a number of reports by the same person on the same incident or more than one related incidents (as e.g., in the case of financial misconduct or crime) may be submitted; the investigating authorities need to attribute these to the same reporter, in order to handle them properly and use them effectively.  
Online reporting systems have provided a means for overcoming the latter obstacle. However, the approach most commonly followed in such systems is to associate each report with the verified identity of the reporter or by an incident ID, assigned to the first submitted report. Whereas this greatly facilitates the management of the reporting process, it fails to address the reporters' concerns regarding the disclosure of their true identity; this can be resolved by allowing anonymous reporting. Even though anonymousreporters were, in the past, perceived to be less credible than identified ones when reporting to the authorities via one-way communication, the perceived credibility of the reporter was recently found not to be statistically different when using two-way communication. Further, investigators have been found to allocate statistically similar amounts of effort to investigate anonymous and identified reports [2]. These results support the use of anonymous, two-way communication in online reporting systems. Anonymous reporters would benefit from the ability to maintain an active dialogue with investigators without jeopardizing their own safety or the effectiveness of the investigation.  
In this paper, we propose ARIBC, an online reporting system that leverages Identity Based Cryptography. The proposed system is based on the Sakai-Kasahara Key Encryption (SAKKE) schemes [3] and the BLMQ (Barreto, Libert, McCullagh, Quisquater) signature scheme. The latter is essentially the Sakai-Kasahara signature scheme [4] that was proposed in [5]. ARIBC offers two-way secure communication between the reporter and the authorities by means of encryption; two-way source authentication and data integrity by means of digital signatures; option to the reporter to remain anonymous; independence from other authentication and authorization infrastructures; ease of implementation and use.  
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: In Section 2 we review related work. In Section 3 the structure and the operational processes of the ARIBC are presented. In Section 4 we discuss implementation issues, and in Section 5 we discuss the security of the ARIBC, and its advantages and drawbacks when compared to alternative approaches. Finally, in Section 6 we summarize our conclusions.