Adding Controllable Linkability to Pairing-Based Group Signatures For Free

Group signatures, which allow users of a group to anonymously produce signatures on behalf of the group, are an important cryptographic primitive for privacy-enhancing applications. Over the years, various approaches to enhanced anonymity management mechanisms, which extend the standard feature of opening of group signatures, have been proposed. In this paper we show how pairing-based group signature schemes (PB-GSSs) following the sign-and-encrypt-and-prove (SEP) paradigm that are secure in the BSZ model can be generically transformed in order to support one particular enhanced anonymity management mechanism, i.e., we propose a transformation that turns every such PB-GSS into a PB-GSS with controllable linkability. Basically, this transformation replaces the public key encryption scheme used for identity escrow within a group signature scheme with a modified all-or-nothing public key encryption with equality tests scheme (denoted AoN-PKEET$^*$) instantiated from the respective public key encryption scheme. Thereby, the respective trapdoor is given to the linking authority as a linking key. The appealing benefit of this approach in contrast to other anonymity management mechanisms (such as those provided by traceable signatures) is that controllable linkability can be added to PB-GSSs based on the SEP paradigm for free, i.e., it neither influences the signature size nor the computational costs for signers and verifiers in comparison to the scheme without this feature

Linking-Based Revocation for Group Signatures: A Pragmatic Approach for Efficient Revocation Checks

Group signature schemes (GSS) represent an important privacy-enhancing technology. However, their practical applicability is restricted due to inefficiencies of existing membership revocation mechanisms that often place a too large computational burden and communication overhead on the involved parties. Moreover, it seems that the general belief (or unwritten law) of avoiding online authorities by all means artificially and unnecessarily restricts the efficiency and practicality of revocation mechanisms in GSSs. While a mindset of preventing online authorities might have been appropriate more than 10 years ago, today the availability of highly reliable cloud computing infrastructures could be used to solve open challenges. More specifically, in order to overcome the inefficiencies of existing revocation mechanisms, we propose an alternative approach denoted as linking-based revocation (LBR) which is based on the concept of controllable linkability. The novelty of LBR is its transparency for signers and verifiers that spares additional computations as well as updates. We therefore introduce dedicated revocation authorities (RAs) that can be contacted for efficient (constant time) revocation checks. In order to protect these RAs and to reduce the trust in involved online authorities, we additionally introduce distributed controllable linkability. Using latter, RAs cooperate with multiple authorities to compute the required linking information, thus reducing the required trust. Besides efficiency, an appealing benefit of LBR is its generic applicability to pairing-based GSSs secure in the BSZ model as well as GSSs with controllable linkability. This includes the XSGS scheme, and the GSSs proposed by Hwang et al., one of which has been standardized in the recent ISO 20008-2 standard

Road-to-Vehicle Communications with Time-Dependent Anonymity: A Light Weight Construction and its Experimental Results

This paper describes techniques that enable vehicles to collect local information (such as road conditions and traffic information) and report it via road-to-vehicle communications. To exclude malicious data, the collected information is signed by each vehicle. In this communications system, the location privacy of vehicles must be maintained. However, simultaneously linkable information (such as travel routes) is also important. That is, no such linkable information can be collected when full anonymity is guaranteed using cryptographic tools such as group signatures. Similarly, continuous linkability (via pseudonyms, for example) may also cause problem from the viewpoint of privacy. In this paper, we propose a road-to-vehicle communication system with relaxed anonymity via group signatures with time-token dependent linking (GS-TDL). Briefly, a vehicle is unlinkable unless it generates multiple signatures in the same time period. We provide our experimental results (using the RELIC library on a cheap and constrained computational power device, Raspberry Pi), and simulate our system by using a traffic simulator (PTV), a radio wave propagation analysis tool (RapLab), and a network simulator (QualNet). Though a similar functionality of time-token dependent linking was proposed by Wu, Domingo-Ferrer and Gonzälez-Nicoläs (IEEE T. Vehicular Technology 2010), we can show an attack against the scheme where anyone can forge a valid group signature without using a secret key. In contrast, our GS-TDL scheme is provably secure. In addition to the time-dependent linking property, our GS-TDL scheme supports verifier-local revocation (VLR), where a signer (vehicle) is not involved in the revocation procedure. It is particularly worth noting that no secret key or certificate of a signer (vehicle) must be updated whereas the security credential management system (SCMS) must update certificates frequently for vehicle privacy. Moreover, our technique maintains constant signing and verification costs by using the linkable part of signatures. This might be of independent interest

Group Signatures with Selective Linkability

Group signatures allow members of a group to anonymously produce signatures on behalf of the group. They are an important building block for privacy-enhancing applications, e.g., enabling user data to be collected in authenticated form while preserving the user’s privacy. The linkability between the signatures thereby plays a crucial role for balancing utility and privacy: knowing the correlation of events significantly increases the utility of the data but also severely harms the user’s privacy. Therefore group signatures are unlinkable per default, but either support linking or identity escrow through a dedicated central party or offer user-controlled linkability. However, both approaches have significant limitations. The former relies on a fully trusted entity and reveals too much information, and the latter requires exact knowledge of the needed linkability at the moment when the signatures are created. However, often the exact purpose of the data might not be clear at the point of data collection. In fact, data collectors tend to gather large amounts of data at first, but will need linkability only for selected, small subsets of the data. We introduce a new type of group signature that provides a more flexible and privacy-friendly access to such selective linkability. When created, all signatures are fully unlinkable. Only when strictly needed or desired, should the required pieces be made linkable with the help of a central entity. For privacy, this linkability is established in an oblivious and non-transitive manner. We formally define the requirements for this new type of group signatures and provide an efficient instantiation that provably satisfies these requirements under discrete-logarithm based assumptions

Privacy Preserving Cryptographic Protocols for Secure Heterogeneous Networks

Disertační práce se zabývá kryptografickými protokoly poskytující ochranu soukromí, které jsou určeny pro zabezpečení komunikačních a informačních systémů tvořících heterogenní sítě. Práce se zaměřuje především na možnosti využití nekonvenčních kryptografických prostředků, které poskytují rozšířené bezpečnostní požadavky, jako je například ochrana soukromí uživatelů komunikačního systému. V práci je stanovena výpočetní náročnost kryptografických a matematických primitiv na různých zařízeních, které se podílí na zabezpečení heterogenní sítě. Hlavní cíle práce se zaměřují na návrh pokročilých kryptografických protokolů poskytujících ochranu soukromí. V práci jsou navrženy celkově tři protokoly, které využívají skupinových podpisů založených na bilineárním párování pro zajištění ochrany soukromí uživatelů. Tyto navržené protokoly zajišťují ochranu soukromí a nepopiratelnost po celou dobu datové komunikace spolu s autentizací a integritou přenášených zpráv. Pro navýšení výkonnosti navržených protokolů je využito optimalizačních technik, např. dávkového ověřování, tak aby protokoly byly praktické i pro heterogenní sítě.The dissertation thesis deals with privacy-preserving cryptographic protocols for secure communication and information systems forming heterogeneous networks. The thesis focuses on the possibilities of using non-conventional cryptographic primitives that provide enhanced security features, such as the protection of user privacy in communication systems. In the dissertation, the performance of cryptographic and mathematic primitives on various devices that participate in the security of heterogeneous networks is evaluated. The main objectives of the thesis focus on the design of advanced privacy-preserving cryptographic protocols. There are three designed protocols which use pairing-based group signatures to ensure user privacy. These proposals ensure the protection of user privacy together with the authentication, integrity and non-repudiation of transmitted messages during communication. The protocols employ the optimization techniques such as batch verification to increase their performance and become more practical in heterogeneous networks.

Selectively Linkable Group Signatures - Stronger Security and Preserved Verifiability

Group signatures allow group members to sign on behalf of the group anonymously. They are therefore well suited to storing data in a way that preserves the users’ privacy, while guaranteeing its authenticity. Garms and Lehmann (PKC’19) introduced a new type of group signatures that balance privacy with utility by allowing to selectively link subsets of the group signatures via an oblivious entity, the converter. The conversion takes a batch of group signatures and blindly transforms signatures originating from the same user into a consistent representation. Their scheme essentially targets a setting where the entity receiving fully unlinkable signatures and the converted ones is the same: only pseudonyms but not full signatures are converted, and the input to the converter is assumed to be well-formed. Thus, the converted outputs are merely linkable pseudonyms but no longer signatures. In this work we extend and strengthen such convertibly linkable group signatures. Conversion can now be triggered by malicious entities too, and the converted outputs can be publicly verified. This preserves the authentication of data during the conversion process. We define the security of this scheme and give a provably secure instantiation. Our scheme makes use of controlled-malleable NIZKs, which allow proofs to be mauled in a controlled manner. This allows signatures to be blinded, while still ensuring they can be verified during conversions

Ring Signatures with User-Controlled Linkability

Anonymous authentication primitives, e.g., group or ring signatures, allow one to realize privacy-preserving data collection applications, as they strike a balance between authenticity of data being collected and privacy of data providers. At PKC 2021, Diaz and Lehmann defined group signatures with User-Controlled Linkability (UCL) and provided an instantiation based on BBS+ signatures. In a nutshell, a signer of a UCL group signature scheme can link any of her signatures: linking evidence can be produced at signature time, or after signatures have been output, by providing an explicit linking proof. In this paper, we introduce Ring Signatures with User-Controlled Linkability (RS-UCL). Compared to group signatures with user-controlled linkability, RS-UCL require no group manager and can be instantiated in a completely decentralized manner. We also introduce a variation, User Controlled and Autonomous Linkability (RS-UCAL), which gives the user full control of the linkability of their signatures. We provide a formal model for both RS-UCL and RS-UCAL and introduce a compiler that can upgrade any ring signature scheme to RS-UCAL. The compiler leverages a new primitive we call Anonymous Key Randomizable Signatures (AKRS) — a signature scheme where the verification key can be randomized — that can be of independent interest. We also provide different instantiations of AKRS based on Schnorr signatures and on lattices. Finally, we show that an AKRS scheme can additionally be used to construct an RS-UCL scheme

Security, privacy and trust in wireless mesh networks

With the advent of public key cryptography, digital signature schemes have been extensively studied in order to minimize the signature sizes and to accelerate their execution while providing necessary security properties. Due to the privacy concerns pertaining to the usage of digital signatures in authentication schemes, privacy-preserving signature schemes, which provide anonymity of the signer, have attracted substantial interest in research community. Group signature algorithms, where a group member is able to sign on behalf of the group anonymously, play an important role in many privacy-preserving authentication/ identification schemes. On the other hand, a safeguard is needed to hold users accountable for malicious behavior. To this end, a designated opening/revocation manager is introduced to open a given anonymous signature to reveal the identity of the user. If the identified user is indeed responsible for malicious activities, then s/he can also be revoked by the same entity. A related scheme named direct anonymous attestation is proposed for attesting the legitimacy of a trusted computing platform while maintaining its privacy. This dissertation studies the group signature and direct anonymous attestation schemes and their application to wireless mesh networks comprising resource-constrained embedded devices that are required to communicate securely and be authenticated anonymously, while malicious behavior needs to be traced to its origin. Privacy-aware devices that anonymously connect to wireless mesh networks also need to secure their communication via efficient symmetric key cryptography, as well. In this dissertation, we propose an efficient, anonymous and accountable mutual authentication and key agreement protocol applicable to wireless mesh networks. The proposed scheme can easily be adapted to other wireless networks. The proposed scheme is implemented and simulated using cryptographic libraries and simulators that are widely deployed in academic circles. The implementation and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is effective, efficient and feasible in the context of hybrid wireless mesh networks, where users can also act as relaying agents. The primary contribution of this thesis is a novel privacy-preserving anonymous authentication scheme consisting of a set of protocols designed to reconcile user privacy and accountability in an efficient and scalable manner in the same framework. The three-party join protocol, where a user can connect anonymously to the wireless mesh network with the help of two semi-trusted parties (comprising the network operator and a third party), is efficient and easily applicable in wireless networks settings. Furthermore, two other protocols, namely two-party identification and revocation protocols enable the network operator, with the help of the semi-trusted third party, to trace suspected malicious behavior back to its origins and revoke users when necessary. The last two protocols can only be executed when the two semi-trusted parties cooperate to provide accountability. Therefore, the scheme is protected against an omni-present authority (e.g. network operator) violating the privacy of network users at will. We also provide arguments and discussions for security and privacy of the proposed scheme