Anonymous Identification in Ad Hoc Groups New York, NY, USAApril 6 th, 2004 Yevgeniy Dodis, Antonio Nicolosi, Victor Shoup New York University Aggelos Kiayias University of Connecticut

April 6, 2004Antonio Nicolosi — NYU2 Enabling Privacy-Aware Access Control Want to control access to many objects –Each with its own set of authorized users For privacy concerns, users won’t reveal their identity when accessing an object Solution: –Have one ad hoc group for each object –To access an object, users anonymously identify as members of corresponding group

April 6, 2004Antonio Nicolosi — NYU3 Example: Access-controlled Blog Alice is keeping a cool blog about her poems Since she’s shy, she only wants her friends to access it But her friends are shy, too: Maybe one of them is making too much reading …  Solution: Ad Hoc Anonymous Identification scheme

April 6, 2004Antonio Nicolosi — NYU4 Identification Schemes

April 6, 2004Antonio Nicolosi — NYU5 Anonymous Identification

April 6, 2004Antonio Nicolosi — NYU6 Anonymous Identification (cont’d) Alice cannot tell whom she is talking to –Even in the case of two sessions with the same user (unlinkability)

April 6, 2004Antonio Nicolosi — NYU7 Ad Hoc Groups “Structured” Groups vs. E.g. organizations Group Manager Users need a different key per group Ad Hoc Groups E.g. poetry clubs No central authority Can use same key for multiple groups

April 6, 2004Antonio Nicolosi — NYU8 Ad Hoc Anonymous ID: Syntax Setup: system-wide initialization phase Register: per-user initialization –Each user picks a secret key/public key pair –Run only once, regardless of # groups user joins Make-GPK: combines a set of PKs into one GPK Make-GSK: combines a user’s SK with a set of PKs, yielding a single GSK Anon-ID: protocol between a group member (holding GSK) and a verifier (holding GPK)

April 6, 2004Antonio Nicolosi — NYU9 Ad Hoc Anonymous ID: Syntax (cont’d) Make-GPK (running time / to group size) Make-GSK (running time / to group size) Anon-ID (constant running time)

April 6, 2004Antonio Nicolosi — NYU10 Background: One-Way Functions At the core of all modern Cryptography –Several instances are widely accepted … –… but nobody knows if they exist (in particular, cannot exist if P = NP) Family of functions easy to compute, but very hard to invert at a random point xf(x) easy HARD

April 6, 2004Antonio Nicolosi — NYU11 Background: Accumulators Intuition: Secure Dictionary ADT –Element Insertion/Membership Testing Element Insertion –Adding to a set yields a different, larger set –Adding to an accumulator yields a different value of the same size + a witness

April 6, 2004Antonio Nicolosi — NYU12 Background: Accumulators (cont’d) Membership Testing –Sets are transparent: anybody can inspect their content … unless the proper witness is known –Accumulators are opaque: Infeasible to check for membership … Hard to compute “fake witness’’

April 6, 2004Antonio Nicolosi — NYU13 Constructing Ad Hoc Anonymous ID Make-GPK combines PKs by inserting them all into the accumulator Make-GSK runs as Make-GPK, but also keeps track of SK and of the witness for PK In the Anon-ID protocol, the user proves that 1.he knows the SK corresponding to some PK 2.PK has been added in the accumulator Register sets SK=random, PK= f( SK )

April 6, 2004Antonio Nicolosi — NYU14 Ad Hoc Anonymous ID: Variations Identity Escrow –To prevent abuse of anonymity, possible to amend the scheme so that user identity can be recovered by a trusted party Supporting large ad hoc groups –If group changes, need to build new value of GPK from scratch with Make-GPK –But if changes are just user additions, can compute new GPK (and GSK) efficiently

April 6, 2004Antonio Nicolosi — NYU15 Summary We propose a novel cryptographic functionality (Ad Hoc Anonymous ID) enabling flexible, privacy-aware access control We discuss possible variations to handle identity escrow and growing ad hoc groups We design an instance based on a new tool (One-Way Accumulators), efficiently constructible based on standard assumptions

April 6, 2004Antonio Nicolosi — NYU16 Any questions? Thank you!