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A Flexible Framework for Secret Handshakes

Multi-party Anonymous and Un-observable Authentication

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Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 4258))

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Abstract

In the society increasingly concerned with the erosion of privacy, privacy-preserving techniques are becoming very important. This motivates research in cryptographic techniques offering built-in privacy. A secret handshake is a protocol whereby participants establish a secure, anonymous and unobservable communication channel only if they are members of the same group. This type of “private” authentication is a valuable tool in the arsenal of privacy-preserving cryptographic techniques. Prior research focused on 2-party secret handshakes with one-time credentials.

This paper breaks new ground on two accounts: (1) it shows how to obtain secure and efficient secret handshakes with reusable credentials, and (2) it represents the first treatment of group (or multi-party) secret handshakes, thus providing a natural extension to the secret handshake technology. An interesting new issue encountered in multi-party secret handshakes is the need to ensure that all parties are indeed distinct. (This is a real challenge since the parties cannot expose their identities.) We tackle this and other challenging issues in constructing GCD – a flexible framework for secret handshakes. The proposed GCD framework lends itself to many practical instantiations and offers several novel and appealing features such as self-distinction and strong anonymity with reusable credentials. In addition to describing the motivation and step-by-step construction of the framework, this paper provides a thorough security analysis and illustrates two concrete framework instantiations.

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Tsudik, G., Xu, S. (2006). A Flexible Framework for Secret Handshakes. In: Danezis, G., Golle, P. (eds) Privacy Enhancing Technologies. PET 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4258. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11957454_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11957454_17

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-68790-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-68793-1

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