Privacy-preserving auditing for attribute-based credentials

Abstract

Privacy-enhancing attribute-based credentials (PABCs) allow users to authenticate to verifiers in a data-minimizing way, in the sense that users are unlinkable between authentications and only disclose those attributes from their credentials that are relevant to the verifier. We propose a practical scheme to apply the same data minimization principle when the verifiers' authentication logs are subjected to external audits. Namely, we propose an extended PABC scheme where the verifier can further remove attributes from presentation tokens before handing them to an auditor, while preserving the verifiability of the audit tokens. We present a generic construction based on a signature, a signature of knowledge and a trapdoor commitment scheme, prove it secure in the universal composability framework, and give an efficient instantiation based on the strong RSA assumption in the random-oracle model. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.