New Paper: Decentralized Anonymous Credentials

[ninjarobot]

New Paper: Decentralized Anonymous Credentials - https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/622.pdf

In this work we propose a novel anonymous credential scheme that eliminates the need for a trusted
credential issuer.

...

A more interesting question is whether identity certication itself can be decentralized. At least for
certain claims, this seems like a promising direction. For example, non-extended validation SSL certicates
are simply an assertion that the bearer controls the specied domain.1 Similarly, DNS names are generally
an assertion that the owner was the rst to register that name and wants it mapped to certain values (e.g.,
an IP address). In both cases, since these claims are publicly veriable by simple criteria, a distributed set of
entities can easily validate these claims for themselves.

In fact, a fork of Bitcoin, Namecoin [40], uses Bitcoin's append-only ledger mechanism to maintain such
rst-come rst-serve name-value mappings. Individuals register a name and an owning public key. Provided
they are the rst to register that name, they can make arbitrary updates to the associated values by signing
them with the registered key. A DNS system built atop this | DotBIT | is already in experimental
deployment. Namecoin can also be used to maintain mappings from names to public keys. One could
imagine more complex semantics for allowing name registration | e.g., proofs of work, proofs of payment,
TPM attestations, publicly veriable proofs of storage and retrievability of les [49] | supporting more
sophisticated functionality than simple DNS.

related: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/03 ... id_of_cas/