Anonymous authentication scheme for subscription services

Abstract

In bidirectional broadcasting services via networks, all user operations and actions are controlled with the user ID and are recorded by the service providers. This means the user's personal information such as his/her payment method and preferences is disclosed to the providers possibly against the user's will. Hence, to preserve privacy, an anonymous authentication scheme for subscription services would seem to be in order. In this paper, we introduce a subscription service model and its system requirements for preserving privacy. Moreover, we propose an efficient group signature scheme having a property of linkability, which is useful for anonymous authentication and a preference subscription service. We show that our authentication scheme is efficient in terms of signature size and that it is suited to subscription services having many members. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.