A self-certified and sybil-free framework for secure digital identity domain buildup

Abstract

An attacker who can control arbitrarily many user identities can break the security properties of most conceivable systems. This is called a "Sybil attack". We present a solution to this problem that does not require online communication with a trusted third party and that in addition preserves the privacy of honest users. Given an initial so-called Sybil-free identity domain, our proposal can be used for deriving Sybil-free unlinkable pseudonyms associated with other identity domains. The pseudonyms are self-certified and computed by the users themselves from their cryptographic long-term identities. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.