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ABSTRACT

In an open environment such as the Internet, the decision to collaborate with a stranger (e.g., by granting access to a resource) is often based on the characteristics (rather than the identity) of the requester, via digital credentials: Access is granted if Alice's credentials satisfy Bob's access policy. The literature contains many scenarios in which it is desirable to carry out such trust negotiations in a privacy-preserving manner, i.e., so as minimize the disclosure of credentials and/or of access policies. Elegant solutions were proposed for achieving various degrees of privacy-preservation through minimal disclosure. In this paper, we present an efficient protocol that protects both sensitive credentials and policies. That is, Alice gets the resource only if she satisfies Bob's policy, Bob does not learn anything about Alice's credentials (not even whether Alice got access or not), and Alice learns neither Bob's policy structure nor which credentials caused her to gain access.

REFERENCES

• 1: Dan Boneh , Matthew K. Franklin, Identity-Based Encryption from the Weil Pairing, Proceedings of the 21st Annual International Cryptology Conference on Advances in Cryptology, p.213-229, August 19-23, 2001
• 2: Jason E. Holt , Robert W. Bradshaw , Kent E. Seamons , Hilarie Orman, Hidden Credentials, Proceedings of the 2003 ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society, October 30, 2003, Washington, DC [doi>10.1145/1005140.1005142]
• 3: A. C. Yao. How to generate and exchange secrets. In Proceedings of the 27th IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, pages 162--167. IEEE Computer Society Press, 1986.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.4 COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY
      K.4.4 Electronic Commerce
          Subjects: Security

General Terms:
Design, Security

Keywords:
access control, hidden credentials, privacy, secure multi-party computation, trust negotiation