A Privacy-Preserving User Authentication Mechanism for Smart City Mobile Apps

In the dawn of the 5G era, the advances in mobile communications have created a suitable environment for the emergence of a wide spectrum of Smart City mobile applications that will play a significant role towards the improvement of citizens' life quality in the upcoming years. It is expected that Smart City mobile applications will allow citizens to access numerous and diverse services, provided by third-party Service Providers, through their mobile devices (e.g., smartphones). However, in order for the emerging Smart City mobile applications to gain the trust of all involved stakeholders and reach their full potential in the 5G market, many security and privacy concerns should be addressed in advance. Towards this direction, this paper proposes a privacy-preserving user authentication mechanism, developed in the context of the Mobilizador5G project, in order to: (a) provide mobile users with efficient and effective means to authenticate towards Service Providers, while preventing user identification and tracking; (b) allow anonymity revocation in case of user misbehavior; (c) avoid multiple user profiles creation on the Service Provider side; and (d) enable easy integration in current mobile application implementations.