I came across the same problem a couple of years ago (and indeed
iterated through private/public key solutions with a colleague). The
problem is that you can still give your private key to somebody else.
There's no real deterrent unless that private key is used for many
other purposes, thereby discouraging sharing. But if that's the case,
there's no real anonymity anymore, since the private key is tied to
the person's identity.
I found that Chameleon Certificates had nice properties. You have a
master certificate that lists all your attributes. For
authentication, you generate an unlinkable slave certificate with any
subset of attributes. You have to possess the master certificate at
time of use to generate the slave certificate, so you can't pass a
slave certificate to a friend for later use. Then you just need to
ensure that the master certificate includes personal details like
credit card number, SSN, etc. to deter sharing of master
certificates. Note that the slave certificates won't have this
information, so this personal information is safe as long as the
master certificate is not leaked. Since sharing an attribute amounts
to sharing all your attributes, including personal information, this
property serves as a good deterrent. Maybe somebody else can comment
on the technical viability + crypto details of the paper.
P. Persiano and I. Visconti. An Anonymous Credential System and a
Privacy-Aware PKI. In Information Security
and Privacy, 8th Australasian Conference, ACISP 2003, volume 2727 of
Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer Verlag, 2003.
http://springerlink.metapress.com/openurl.asp?
genre=articleissn=0302-9743volume=2727spage=27
Here's the abstract:
In this paper we present a non-transferable anonymous credential
system that is based on the concept of a chameleon certificate. A
chameleon certificate is a special certificate that enjoys two
interesting properties. Firstly, the owner can choose which
attributes of the certificate to disclose. Moreover, a chameleon
certificate is multi-show in the sense that several uses of the same
chameleon certificate by the same user cannot be linked together.
We adopt the framework of Brands [2] and our construction improves
the results of Camenisch et al. [5] and Verheul [16] since it allows
the owner of a certificate to prove general statements on the
attributes encoded in the certificate and our certificates enjoy the
multi-show property.
Apu
--
Apu Kapadia, Ph.D.
Research Fellow, Institute for Security Technology Studies (ISTS)
Dartmouth College, Hanover NH 03755, USA
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~akapadia/
On Apr 1, 2006, at 6:35 AM, Ben Laurie wrote:
It is possible to use blind signatures to produce anonymity-preserving
credentials. The general idea is that, say, British Airways want to
testify that I am a silver BA Executive Club cardholder. First I
create
a random number (a nonce), I blind it, then send it to BA. They
sign it
with their “this guy is a silver member” signing key, I unblind the
signature and then I can show the signed nonce to anyone who wants to
verify that I am silver. All they need to do is check the signature
against BA’s published silver member key. BA cannot link this nonce
back
to me because they have never seen it, so they cannot distinguish me
from any other member.
However, anyone I show this proof to can then masquerade as a silver
member, using my signed nonce. So, it occurred to me that an easy
way to
prevent this is to create a private/public key pair and instead of the
nonce use the hash of the public key. Then to prove my silver status I
have to show that both the hash is signed by BA and that I possess the
corresponding private key (by signing a nonce, say).
It seems to me quite obvious that someone must have thought of this
before - the question is who? Is it IP free?
Obviously this kind of credential could be quite useful in identity
management. Note, though, that this scheme doesn’t give me
unlinkability
unless I only show each public/private key pair once. What I really
need
is a family of unlinkable public/private key pairs that I can somehow
get signed with a single “family” signature (obviously this would need
to be unlinkably transformed for each member of the key family).
Permalink: http://www.links.org/?p=88
Cheers,
Ben.
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