Anonymous Authentication for Smartcards

The paper presents an innovative solution in the field of RFID (Radio-Frequency IDentification) smartcard authentication. Currently the smartcards are used for many purposes - e.g. employee identification, library cards, student cards or even identity credentials. Personal identity is revealed to untrustworthy entities every time we use these cards. Such information could later be used without our knowledge and for harmful reasons like shopping pattern scanning or even movement tracking. We present a communication scheme for keeping one’s identity private in this paper. Although our system provides anonymity, it does not allow users to abuse this feature. The system is based on strong cryptographic primitives that provide features never available before. Besides theoretical design of the anonymous authentication scheme and its analysis we also provide implementation results

Anonymous authentication of membership in dynamic groups

Thesis (S.B. and M.Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1999.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 34-36).by Todd C. Parnell.S.B.and M.Eng

Identity-based edge computing anonymous authentication protocol

With the development of sensor technology and wireless communication technology, edge computing has a wider range of applications. The privacy protection of edge computing is of great significance. In the edge computing system, in order to ensure the credibility of the source of terminal data, mobile edge computing (MEC) needs to verify the signature of the terminal node on the data. During the signature process, the computing power of edge devices such as wireless terminals can easily become the bottleneck of system performance. Therefore, it is very necessary to improve efficiency through computational offloading. Therefore, this paper proposes an identity-based edge computing anonymous authentication protocol. The protocol realizes mutual authentication and obtains a shared key by encrypting the mutual information. The encryption algorithm is implemented through a thresholded identity-based proxy ring signature. When a large number of terminals offload computing, MEC can set the priority of offloading tasks according to the user’s identity and permissions, thereby improving offloading efficiency. Security analysis shows that the scheme can guarantee the anonymity and unforgeability of signatures. The probability of a malicious node forging a signature is equivalent to cracking the discrete logarithm puzzle. According to the efficiency analysis, in the case of MEC offloading, the computational complexity is significantly reduced, the computing power of edge devices is liberated, and the signature efficiency is improved

Constant-size dynamic k-times anonymous authentication

Dynamic k-times anonymous authentication (k-TAA) schemes allow members of a group to be authenticated anonymously by application providers for a bounded number of times, where application providers can independently and dynamically grant or revoke access right to members in their own group. In this paper, we construct a dynamic k-TAA scheme with space and time complexities of O(log(k)) and a variant, in which the authentication protocol only requires constant time and space complexities at the cost of O(k) -sized public key. We also describe some tradeoff issues between different system characteristics. We detail all the zero-knowledge proof-of-knowledge protocols involved and show that our construction is secure in the random oracle model under the q-strong Diffie-Hellman assumption and q-decisional Diffie-Hellman inversion assumption. We provide a proof-of-concept implementation, experiment on its performance, and show that our scheme is practical

Security Analysis and Improvement of an Anonymous Authentication Scheme for Roaming Services

An anonymous authentication scheme for roaming services in global mobility networks allows a mobile user visiting a foreign network to achieve mutual authentication and session key establishment with the foreign-network operator in an anonymous manner. In this work, we revisit He et al.’s anonymous authentication scheme for roaming services and present previously unpublished security weaknesses in the scheme: (1) it fails to provide user anonymity against any third party as well as the foreign agent, (2) it cannot protect the passwords of mobile users due to its vulnerability to an offline dictionary attack, and (3) it does not achieve session-key security against a man-in-the-middle attack. We also show how the security weaknesses of He et al.’s scheme can be addressed without degrading the efficiency of the scheme

On the efficiency of revocation in RSA-based anonymous systems

© 2016 IEEEThe problem of revocation in anonymous authentication systems is subtle and has motivated a lot of work. One of the preferable solutions consists in maintaining either a whitelist L-W of non-revoked users or a blacklist L-B of revoked users, and then requiring users to additionally prove, when authenticating themselves, that they are in L-W (membership proof) or that they are not in L-B (non-membership proof). Of course, these additional proofs must not break the anonymity properties of the system, so they must be zero-knowledge proofs, revealing nothing about the identity of the users. In this paper, we focus on the RSA-based setting, and we consider the case of non-membership proofs to blacklists L = L-B. The existing solutions for this setting rely on the use of universal dynamic accumulators; the underlying zero-knowledge proofs are bit complicated, and thus their efficiency; although being independent from the size of the blacklist L, seems to be improvable. Peng and Bao already tried to propose simpler and more efficient zero-knowledge proofs for this setting, but we prove in this paper that their protocol is not secure. We fix the problem by designing a new protocol, and formally proving its security properties. We then compare the efficiency of the new zero-knowledge non-membership protocol with that of the protocol, when they are integrated with anonymous authentication systems based on RSA (notably, the IBM product Idemix for anonymous credentials). We discuss for which values of the size k of the blacklist L, one protocol is preferable to the other one, and we propose different ways to combine and implement the two protocols.Postprint (author's final draft

Reconfigurable Security: Edge Computing-based Framework for IoT

In various scenarios, achieving security between IoT devices is challenging since the devices may have different dedicated communication standards, resource constraints as well as various applications. In this article, we first provide requirements and existing solutions for IoT security. We then introduce a new reconfigurable security framework based on edge computing, which utilizes a near-user edge device, i.e., security agent, to simplify key management and offload the computational costs of security algorithms at IoT devices. This framework is designed to overcome the challenges including high computation costs, low flexibility in key management, and low compatibility in deploying new security algorithms in IoT, especially when adopting advanced cryptographic primitives. We also provide the design principles of the reconfigurable security framework, the exemplary security protocols for anonymous authentication and secure data access control, and the performance analysis in terms of feasibility and usability. The reconfigurable security framework paves a new way to strength IoT security by edge computing.Comment: under submission to possible journal publication