Abstract
In the pursuit of authentication schemes that balance user privacy and accountability, numerous anonymous credential systems have been constructed. However, existing systems assume a client-server architecture in which only the clients, but not the servers, care about their privacy. In peer-to-peer (P2P) systems where both clients and servers are peer users with privacy concerns, no existing system correctly strikes that balance between privacy and accountability.
In this paper, we provide this missing piece: a credential system in which peers are pseudonymous to one another (that is, two who interact more than once can recognize each other via pseudonyms) but are otherwise anonymous and unlinkable across different peers. Such a credential system finds applications in, e.g., Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANets) and P2P networks.
We formalize the security requirements of our proposed credential system, provide a construction for it, and prove the security of our construction. Our solution is efficient: its complexities are independent of the number of users in the system.
This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant CNS-0524695. The views and conclusions do not necessarily represent those of the sponsors.
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Tsang, P.P., Smith, S.W. (2008). PPAA: Peer-to-Peer Anonymous Authentication. In: Bellovin, S.M., Gennaro, R., Keromytis, A., Yung, M. (eds) Applied Cryptography and Network Security. ACNS 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5037. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-68914-0_4
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