889 research outputs found
Anonymity and trust in the electronic world
Privacy has never been an explicit goal of authorization mechanisms. The traditional
approach to authorisation relies on strong authentication of a stable identity
using long term credentials. Audit is then linked to authorization via the same
identity. Such an approach compels users to enter into a trust relationship with
large parts of the system infrastructure, including entities in remote domains. In
this dissertation we advance the view that this type of compulsive trust relationship
is unnecessary and can have undesirable consequences. We examine in some
detail the consequences which such undesirable trust relationships can have on
individual privacy, and investigate the extent to which taking a unified approach
to trust and anonymity can actually provide useful leverage to address threats to
privacy without compromising the principal goals of authentication and audit. We
conclude that many applications would benefit from mechanisms which enabled
them to make authorization decisions without using long-term credentials. We
next propose specific mechanisms to achieve this, introducing a novel notion of
a short-lived electronic identity, which we call a surrogate. This approach allows
a localisation of trust and entities are not compelled to transitively trust other entities
in remote domains. In particular, resolution of stable identities needs only
ever to be done locally to the entity named. Our surrogates allow delegation, enable
role-based access control policies to be enforced across multiple domains,
and permit the use of non-anonymous payment mechanisms, all without compromising
the privacy of a user. The localisation of trust resulting from the approach
proposed in this dissertation also has the potential to allow clients to control the
risks to which they are exposed by bearing the cost of relevant countermeasures
themselves, rather than forcing clients to trust the system infrastructure to protect
them and to bear an equal share of the cost of all countermeasures whether or not
effective for them. This consideration means that our surrogate-based approach
and mechanisms are of interest even in Kerberos-like scenarios where anonymity
is not a requirement, but the remote authentication mechanism is untrustworthy
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
A Decentralised Digital Identity Architecture
Current architectures to validate, certify, and manage identity are based on
centralised, top-down approaches that rely on trusted authorities and
third-party operators. We approach the problem of digital identity starting
from a human rights perspective, with a primary focus on identity systems in
the developed world. We assert that individual persons must be allowed to
manage their personal information in a multitude of different ways in different
contexts and that to do so, each individual must be able to create multiple
unrelated identities. Therefore, we first define a set of fundamental
constraints that digital identity systems must satisfy to preserve and promote
privacy as required for individual autonomy. With these constraints in mind, we
then propose a decentralised, standards-based approach, using a combination of
distributed ledger technology and thoughtful regulation, to facilitate
many-to-many relationships among providers of key services. Our proposal for
digital identity differs from others in its approach to trust in that we do not
seek to bind credentials to each other or to a mutually trusted authority to
achieve strong non-transferability. Because the system does not implicitly
encourage its users to maintain a single aggregated identity that can
potentially be constrained or reconstructed against their interests,
individuals and organisations are free to embrace the system and share in its
benefits.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figures, 3 table
Blockchain, consensus, and cryptography in electronic voting
Motivated by the recent trends to conduct electronic elections using blockchain technologies, we review the vast literature on cryptographic voting and assess the status of the field. We analyze the security requirements for voting systems and describe the major ideas behind the most influential cryptographic protocols for electronic voting. We focus on the great importance of consensus in the elimination of trusted third parties. Finally, we examine whether recent blockchain innovations can satisfy the strict requirements set for the security of electronic voting
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