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SPROOF: A Decentralized Platform for Attribute-Based Authentication

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Information Systems Security and Privacy (ICISSP 2019)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1221))

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Abstract

Paper documents are still very common for all types of records of personal achievements, ID cards and many other types documents issued to an individual or a company. These paper documents, however, often come at the cost of expensive printing and issuing, loss of data or malicious counterfeits. The origin and integrity is often hard or even impossible to be verified. Digital signatures solve some of these issues, however, this still requires centralized trusted infrastructures and still does not allow for easy verification or recovery of lost documents. Furthermore, attribute-based authentication is not possible with traditional signature schemes. In this paper, we present a decentralized platform for signing and verifying digital documents that is based on the previously presented SPROOF platform and additionally supports attribute-based authentication. This platform allows for issuing, managing and verifying digital documents in a public blockchain. In the proposed approach, all data needed for verification of documents and issuers is stored decentralized, transparent, and integrity protected. The platform is permissionless and thus no access restrictions apply. Rather, following principles of the Web of Trust, issuers can confirm each other in a decentralized way. Additionally, scalability and privacy issues are taken into consideration.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://digitalcurrency.unic.ac.cy/free-introductory-mooc/self-verifiable-certificates-on-the-bitcoin-blockchain/academic-certificates-on-the-blockchain/ [retrieved: August 16, 2018].

  2. 2.

    https://www.blockcerts.org/ [retrieved: August 16, 2018].

  3. 3.

    https://www.uport.me/.

  4. 4.

    The problem that two conflicting transactions spend the same funds twice.

  5. 5.

    http://swarm-gateways.net/bzz:/theswarm.eth/ [retrieved: August 23, 2018].

  6. 6.

    Deriving a key from a password is not recommended [22].

  7. 7.

    The cost for a transaction without additional data on Ethereum is 21000 Gas.

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Acknowledgments

The overall support of Rainer Böhme from the University of Innsbruck as the supervisor of [3] and especially the initial idea of using HD wallets to build pseudonym trees to enable the completeness feature is gratefully acknowledged. The authors also like to acknowledge Michael Fröwis and Pascal Schöttle for discussions about this topic. The financial support by the Federal State of Salzburg is gratefully acknowledged. Funding by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) under project number 865082 (ProChain) is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Secure Energy Informatics, Salzburg University of Applied Sciences, Puch bei Hallein, Austria

    Clemens Brunner, Fabian Knirsch & Dominik Engel

Authors
  1. Clemens Brunner
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  2. Fabian Knirsch
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  3. Dominik Engel
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Clemens Brunner .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. IIT-CNR, Pisa, Italy

    Paolo Mori

  2. Plymouth University, Plymouth, UK

    Steven Furnell

  3. MODESTE/ESEO, Angers Cedex 2, France

    Olivier Camp

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Brunner, C., Knirsch, F., Engel, D. (2020). SPROOF: A Decentralized Platform for Attribute-Based Authentication. In: Mori, P., Furnell, S., Camp, O. (eds) Information Systems Security and Privacy. ICISSP 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1221. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49443-8_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49443-8_1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-49442-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-49443-8

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