Anonymous Credentials: Secret-Free and Quantum-Safe

Raza Kazmi and Cyrus Minwalla

Staff Working Papers from Bank of Canada

Abstract: An anonymous credential mechanism is a set of protocols that allows users to obtain credentials from an organization and demonstrate ownership of these credentials without compromising users’ privacy. In this work, we construct the first secret-free and quantum-safe credential mechanism. The scheme is secret-free in the sense that an organization does not need to guard a secret key. The scheme is also lightweight in construction. Security of the scheme relies on the ability of the organization to maintain the integrity of a publicly known data structure—namely, a Merkle tree—that utilizes a quantum-safe, partially homomorphic hash function as a foundational primitive. We also construct a simple, quantum-safe, zero-knowledge argument of knowledge of membership in the Merkle tree. Additionally, we explore a concrete instantiation of the scheme and show it to be practically efficient for the core functions of enrollment and verification.

Keywords: Central bank research; Digital currencies and fintech; Payment clearing and settlement systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E42 G21 O31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2023-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban and nep-pay
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bca:bocawp:23-50

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