Attribute-based pseudonymity for privacy-preserving authentication in cloud services

Victor Sucasas, Georgios Mantas, Maria Papaioannou, Jonathan Rodriguez

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Attribute-based authentication is considered a cornerstone component to achieve scalable fine-grained access control in the fast growing market of cloud-based services. Unfortunately, it also poses a privacy concern. Users attributes should not be linked to the users identity and spread across different organizations. To tackle this issue, several solutions have been proposed such as Privacy Attribute-Based Credentials (Privacy-ABCs), which support pseudonym-based authentication with embedded attributes. Privacy-ABCs allow users to establish anonymous accounts with service providers while hiding the identity of the user under a pseudonym. However, Privacy-ABCs require the selective disclosure of the attribute values towards service providers. Other schemes such as Attribute Base Signatures (ABS) and mesh signatures do not require the disclosure of attributes; unfortunately, these schemes do not cater for pseudonym generation in their construction, and hence cannot be used to establish anonymous accounts. In this paper, we propose a pseudonym-based signature scheme that enables unlinkable pseudonym self-generation with embedded attributes, similarly to Privacy-ABCs, and integrates a secret sharing scheme in a similar fashion to ABS and mesh signature schemes for attribute verification. Our proposed scheme also provides verifiable collusion, enabling users to share attributes according to the service providers policies.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)168-184
Number of pages17
JournalIEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing
Volume11
Issue number1
Early online date27 May 2021
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 27 May 2021
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Authentication
  • Cloud computing
  • Organizations
  • Performance evaluation
  • Privacy
  • Public key
  • Technological innovation

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