Abstract
Over the last years, the Web has evolved into the premium forum for freely and anonymously disseminating and collecting information and opinions. However, the ability to anonymously exchange information, and hence the inability of users to identify the information providers and to determine their credibility, raises serious concerns about the reliability of exchanged information.
In this paper we propose a methodology for designing security protocols that enforce fine-grained trust policies while still ensuring the anonymity of the users. The fundamental idea of this methodology is to incorporate non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs: the trust level of users are certified using digital signatures, and users assert their trust level by proving in zero-knowledge the possession of such certificates. Since the proofs are zero-knowledge, they provably do not reveal any information about the users except for their trust levels; in particular, the proofs hide their identities.
We additionally propose a technique for verifying the security properties of these protocols in a fully automated manner. We specify protocols in the applied pi-calculus, formalize trust policies as authorization policies, and define anonymity properties in terms of observational equivalence relations. The verification of these properties is then conducted using an extension of recently proposed static analysis techniques for reasoning about symbolic abstractions of zero-knowledge proofs.
Work partially supported by the initiative for excellence of the German federal government, by DFG Emmy Noether program, and by MIUR project “SOFT”.
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Backes, M., Maffei, M. (2013). Design and Verification of Anonymous Trust Protocols. In: Christianson, B., Malcolm, J.A., Matyáš, V., Roe, M. (eds) Security Protocols XVII. Security Protocols 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7028. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36213-2_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36213-2_17
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