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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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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of California, Irvine

    Gene Tsudik

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Texas, San Antonio

    Shouhuai Xu

Authors
  1. Gene Tsudik
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  2. Shouhuai Xu
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK

    George Danezis

  2. Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd, 94304, Palo Alto, CA, USA

    Philippe Golle

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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

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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