Decentralized Blacklistable Anonymous Credentials with Reputation

Blacklistable anonymous credential systems provide service providers with a way to authenticate users according to their historical behaviors, while guaranteeing that all users can access services in an anonymous and unlinkable manner, thus are potentially useful in practice. Traditionally, to protect services from illegal access, the credential issuer, which completes the registration with users, must be trusted by the service provider. However, in practice, this trust assumption is usually unsatisfied. Besides, to better evaluate users, it is desired to use blacklists, which record historical behaviors of users, of other service providers, but currently, this will threaten the security unless a strong trust assumption is made. Another potential security issue in current blacklistable anonymous credential systems is the blacklist gaming attack, where the service provider attempt to compromise the privacy of users via generating blacklist maliciously. In this paper, we solve these problems and present the decentralized blacklistable anonymous credential system with reputation, which inherits nearly all features of the BLACR system presented in Au et.al. (NDSS\u2712). However, in our new system, no trusted party is needed to register users. Moreover, blacklists from other service providers can be used safely in the new system assuming a minimal trust assumption holds. Besides, the new system is also partially resilient to the blacklist gaming attack. Technically, the main approach to solving these problems is a novel use of the blockchain technique, which serve as a public append-only ledger and are used to store credentials and blacklists. To simplify the construction, we also present a generic framework for constructing our new system. The general framework can be instantiated from three different types of cryptographic systems, including the RSA system, the classical DL system, and the pairing based system, and all these three types of instantiations can be supported simultaneously in the framework. To demonstrate the practicability of our system, we also give a proof of concept implementation for the instantiation under the RSA system. The experiment results indicate that when authenticating with blacklists of reasonable size, our implementation can fulfill practical efficiency demands, and when authenticating with empty blacklists, it is more efficient than that of Garman et al. (NDSS\u2714), which presents a decentralized anonymous credential system without considering revocation

Attribute-based Anonymous Credential: Optimization for Single-Use and Multi-Use

User attributes can be authenticated by an attribute-based anonymous credential while keeping the anonymity of the user. Most attribute-based anonymous credential schemes are designed specifically for either multi-use or single-use. In this paper, we propose a unified attribute-based anonymous credential system, in which users always obtain the same format of credential from the issuer. The user can choose to use it for an efficient multi-use or single-use show proof. It is a more user-centric approach than the existing schemes. Technically, we propose an interactive approach to the credential issuance protocol using a two-party computation with an additive homomorphic encryption. At the same time, it keeps the security property of impersonation resilience, anonymity, and unlinkability. Apart from the interactive protocol, we further design the show proofs for efficient single-use credentials which maintain the user anonymity

Fast Revocation of Attribute-Based Credentials for Both Users and Verifiers

Attribute-based credentials allow a user to prove properties about herself anonymously. Revoking such credentials, which requires singling them out, is hard because it is at odds with anonymity. All revocation schemes proposed to date either sacrifice anonymity altogether, require the parties to be online, or put high load on the user or the verifier. As a result, these schemes are either too complicated for low-powered devices like smart cards or they do not scale. We propose a new revocation scheme that has a very low computational cost for users and verifiers, and does not require users to process updates. We trade only a limited, but well-defined, amount of anonymity to make the first practical revocation scheme that is efficient at large scales and fast enough for smart cards

Lattice-Based Techniques for Accountable Anonymity: Composition of Abstract Stern’s Protocols and Weak PRF with Efficient Protocols from LWR

In an accountable anonymous system, a user is guaranteed anonymity and unlinkability unless some well-defined condition is met. A line of research focus on schemes that do not rely on any trusted third party capable of de-anonymising users. Notable examples include $k$-times anonymous authentication ($k$-TAA), blacklistable anonymous credentials (BLAC) and linkable ring signatures (LRS). All instances of these schemes are based on traditional number theoretic assumptions, which are vulnerable to quantum attacks. One common feature of these schemes is the need to limit the number of times a key can be (mis-)used. Traditionally, it is usually achieved through the use of a pseudorandom function (PRF) which maps a user\u27s key to a pseudonym, along with a proof of correctness. However, existing lattice-based PRFs do not interact well with zero-knowledge proofs. To bridge this gap, we propose and develop the following techniques and primitives: We formalize the notion of weak PRF with efficient protocols, which allows a prover to convince a verifier that the function $\mathsf{F}$ is evaluated correctly. Specifically, we provide an efficient construction based on the learning with rounding problem, which uses abstract Stern\u27s Protocol to prove $y = \mathsf{F}_k(x)$ and $y \neq \mathsf{F}_k(x)$ without revealing $x$, $y$ or $k$. We develop a general framework, which we call extended abstract Stern\u27s protocol, to construct zero-knowledge arguments system for statements formed by conjunction and disjunction of sub-statements, who (or whose variants) are provable using abstract Stern\u27s Protocol. Specifically, our system supports arbitrary monotonic propositions and allows a prover to argue polynomial relationships of the witnesses used in these sub-statements. As many existing lattice-based primitives also admit proofs using abstract Stern\u27s protocol, our techniques can easily glue different primitives together for privacy-enhancing applications in a simple and clean way. Indeed, we propose three new schemes, all of which are the first of its kind, in the lattice setting. They also enjoy additional advantages over instances of the number-theoretic counterpart. Our $k$-TAA and BLAC schemes support concurrent enrollment while our LRS features logarithmic signature size without relying on a trusted setup. Our techniques enrich the arsenal of privacy-enhancing techniques and could be useful in the constructions of other schemes such as e-cash, unique group signatures, public key encryption with verifiable decryption, etc

Nymbler: Privacy-enhanced Protection from Abuses of Anonymity

Anonymous communications networks help to solve the real and important problem of enabling users to communicate privately over the Internet. However, by doing so, they also introduce an entirely new problem: How can service providers on the Internet---such as websites, IRC networks and mail servers---allow anonymous access while protecting themselves against abuse by misbehaving anonymous users? Recent research efforts have focused on using anonymous blacklisting systems (also known as anonymous revocation systems) to solve this problem. As opposed to revocable anonymity systems, which enable some trusted third party to deanonymize users, anonymous blacklisting systems provide a way for users to authenticate anonymously with a service provider, while enabling the service provider to revoke access from individual misbehaving anonymous users without revealing their identities. The literature contains several anonymous blacklisting systems, many of which are impractical for real-world deployment. In 2006, however, Tsang et al. proposed Nymble, which solves the anonymous blacklisting problem very efficiently using trusted third parties. Nymble has inspired a number of subsequent anonymous blacklisting systems. Some of these use fundamentally different approaches to accomplish what Nymble does without using third parties at all; so far, these proposals have all suffered from serious performance and scalability problems. Other systems build on the Nymble framework to reduce Nymble's trust assumptions while maintaining its highly efficient design. The primary contribution of this thesis is a new anonymous blacklisting system built on the Nymble framework---a nimbler version of Nymble---called Nymbler. We propose several enhancements to the Nymble framework that facilitate the construction of a scheme that minimizes trust in third parties. We then propose a new set of security and privacy properties that anonymous blacklisting systems should possess to protect: 1) users' privacy against malicious service providers and third parties (including other malicious users), and 2) service providers against abuse by malicious users. We also propose a set of performance requirements that anonymous blacklisting systems should meet to maximize their potential for real-world adoption, and formally define some optional features in the anonymous blacklisting systems literature. We then present Nymbler, which improves on existing Nymble-like systems by reducing the level of trust placed in third parties, while simultaneously providing stronger privacy guarantees and some new functionality. It avoids dependence on trusted hardware and unreasonable assumptions about non-collusion between trusted third parties. We have implemented all key components of Nymbler, and our measurements indicate that the system is highly practical. Our system solves several open problems in the anonymous blacklisting systems literature, and makes use of some new cryptographic constructions that are likely to be of independent theoretical interest

Efficient Zero-Knowledge Proofs and Applications

Zero-knowledge proofs provide a means for a prover to convince a verifier that some claim is true and nothing more. The ability to prove statements while conveying zero information beyond their veracity has profound implications for cryptography and, especially, for its applicability to privacy-enhancing technologies. Unfortunately, the most common zero-knowledge techniques in the literature suffer from poor scalability, which limits their usefulness in many otherwise promising applications. This dissertation addresses the problem of designing communication- and computation-efficient protocols for zero-knowledge proofs and arguments of propositions that comprise many "simple" predicates. In particular, we propose a new formal model in which to analyze batch zero-knowledge protocols and perform the first systematic study of systems for batch zero-knowledge proofs and arguments of knowledge. In the course of this study, we suggest a general construction for batch zero-knowledge proof systems and use it to realize several new protocols suitable for proving knowledge of and relationships among large batches of discrete logarithm (DL) representations in prime-order groups. Our new protocols improve on existing protocols in several ways; for example, among the new protocols is one with lower asymptotic computation cost than any other such system in the literature. We also tackle the problem of constructing batch proofs of partial knowledge, proposing new protocols to prove knowledge of a DL that is equal to at least k-out-of-n other DLs, at most k-out-of-n other DLs, or exactly k-out-of-n other DLs. These constructions are particularly interesting as they prove some propositions that appear difficult to prove using existing techniques, even when efficiency is not a primary consideration. We illustrate the applicability of our new techniques by using them to construct efficient protocols for anonymous blacklisting and reputation systems

Anonymous Point Collection - Improved Models and Security Definitions

This work is a comprehensive, formal treatment of anonymous point collection. The proposed definition does not only provide a strong notion of security and privacy, but also covers features which are important for practical use. An efficient realization is presented and proven to fulfill the proposed definition. The resulting building block is the first one that allows for anonymous two-way transactions, has semi-offline capabilities, yields constant storage size, and is provably secure

Anonymous Point Collection - Improved Models and Security Definitions

This work is a comprehensive, formal treatment of anonymous point collection. The proposed definition does not only provide a strong notion of security and privacy, but also covers features which are important for practical use. An efficient realization is presented and proven to fulfill the proposed definition. The resulting building block is the first one that allows for anonymous two-way transactions, has semi-offline capabilities, yields constant storage size, and is provably secure