Toward Mending Two Nation-Scale Brokered Identification Systems.

Available online public/governmental services requiring authentication by citizens have considerably expanded in recent years. This has hindered the usability and security associated with credential management by users and service providers. To address the problem, some countries have proposed nation-scale identification/authentication systems that intend to greatly reduce the burden of credential management, while seemingly offering desirable privacy benefits. In this paper we analyze two such systems: the Federal Cloud Credential Exchange (FCCX) in the United States and GOV.UK Verify in the United Kingdom, which altogether aim at serving more than a hundred million citizens. Both systems propose a brokered identification architecture, where an online central hub mediates user authentications between identity providers and service providers. We show that both FCCX and GOV.UK Verify suffer from serious privacy and security shortcomings, fail to comply with privacy-preserving guidelines they are meant to follow, and may actually degrade user privacy. Notably, the hub can link interactions of the same user across different service providers and has visibility over private identifiable information of citizens. In case of malicious compromise it is also able to undetectably impersonate users. Within the structural design constraints placed on these nation-scale brokered identification systems, we propose feasible technical solutions to the privacy and security issues we identified. We conclude with a strong recommendation that FCCX and GOV.UK Verify be subject to a more in-depth technical and public review, based on a defined and comprehensive threat model, and adopt adequate structural adjustments

An Empirical Study and Some Improvements of the MiniMac Protocol for Secure Computation

Recent developments in Multi-party Computation (MPC) has resulted in very efficient protocols for dishonest majority in the pre- processing model. In particular, two very promising protocols for Boolean circuits have been proposed by Nielsen et al. (nicknamed TinyOT) and by Damg ̊ard and Zakarias (nicknamed MiniMac). While TinyOT has already been implemented, we present in this paper the first implemen- tation of MiniMac, using the same platform as the existing TinyOT im- plementation. We also suggest several improvements of MiniMac, both on the protocol design and implementation level. In particular, we sug- gest a modification of MiniMac that achieves increased parallelism at no extra communication cost. This gives an asymptotic improvement of the original protocol as well as an 8-fold speed-up of our implementation. We compare the resulting protocol to TinyOT for the case of secure com- putation in parallel of a large number of AES encryptions and find that it performs better than results reported so far on TinyOT, on the same hardware