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Collaborative Authentication Using Threshold Cryptography

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Emerging Technologies for Authorization and Authentication (ETAA 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 11967))

Abstract

We propose a collaborative authentication protocol where multiple user devices (e.g., a smartphone, a smartwatch and a wristband) collaborate to authenticate the user to a third party service provider. Our protocol uses a threshold signature scheme as the main building block. The use of threshold signatures minimises the security threats in that the user devices only store shares of the signing key (i.e., the private key) and the private key is never reconstructed. For user devices that do not have secure storage capability (e.g., some wearables), we propose to use fuzzy extractors to generate their secret shares using behaviometric information when needed, so that there is no need for them to store any secret material. We discuss how to reshare the private key without reconstructing it in case a new device is added and how to repair shares that are lost due to device loss or damage. Our implementation results demonstrate the feasibility of the protocol.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/abdelrahamanaly/mpcToolkit.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comment. This work was supported by imec through ICON DiskMan, the Security & Privacy Centre projects on Biometrics & Authentication and Secure Distance Bounding. It was also funded by the Flemish government through the FWO SBO project SPITE S002417N.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. imec-COSIC, KU Leuven, Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 - bus 2452, 3001, Heverlee, Belgium

    Aysajan Abidin, Abdelrahaman Aly & Mustafa A. Mustafa

  2. Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK

    Mustafa A. Mustafa

Authors
  1. Aysajan Abidin
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  2. Abdelrahaman Aly
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  3. Mustafa A. Mustafa
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Aysajan Abidin .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. IIT-CNR, Pisa, Italy

    Andrea Saracino

  2. IIT-CNR, Pisa, Italy

    Paolo Mori

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Abidin, A., Aly, A., Mustafa, M.A. (2020). Collaborative Authentication Using Threshold Cryptography. In: Saracino, A., Mori, P. (eds) Emerging Technologies for Authorization and Authentication. ETAA 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11967. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39749-4_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39749-4_8

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