Building Privacy-Preserving Cryptographic Credentials from Federated Online Identities

Federated identity providers, e.g., Facebook and PayPal, offer a convenient means for authenticating users to third-party applications. Unfortunately such cross-site authentications carry privacy and tracking risks. For example, federated identity providers can learn what applications users are accessing; meanwhile, the applications can know the users’ identities in reality. This paper presents Crypto-Book, an anonymizing layer enabling federated identity authentications while preventing these risks. CryptoBook uses a set of independently managed servers that employ a (t, n)-threshold cryptosystem to collectively assign credentials to each federated identity (in the form of either a public/private keypair or blinded signed messages). With the credentials in hand, clients can then leverage anonymous authentication techniques such as linkable ring signatures or partially blind signatures to log into third-party applications in an anonymous yet accountable way. We have implemented a pr...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: CODASPY
• Authors: John Maheswaran, Daniel Jackowitz, Ennan Zhai, David Isaac Wolinsky, Bryan Ford
• Keywords: CODASPY 2016, Security Privacy