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Mutual Accountability Layer: Accountable Anonymity Within Accountable Trust

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Cyber Security, Cryptology, and Machine Learning (CSCML 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13301))

Abstract

Anonymous cryptographic primitives reduce the traces left by users when they interact over a digital platform. But they also prevent a platform owner from holding users accountable for malicious behaviour. Revocable anonymity offers a compromise by allowing only the manager of the digital platform to de-anonymize a user’s activities when necessary. However, a misbehaving manager can abuse their de-anonymization power by de-anonymizing activities without the user’s awareness.

Although previous works mitigate this issue by distributing the de-anonymization power across several entities, there is no comprehensive and formal treatment where both accountability and non-frameability (i.e., the inability to falsely accuse a party of misbehavior) for both the user and the manager are explicitly defined and provably achieved.

In this paper we formally define mutual accountability: a user can be held accountable for her otherwise anonymous digital actions and a manager is held accountable for every de-anonymization attempt. Also, no honest party can be framed regardless of what malicious parties do.

In contrast with previous work, we do not distribute the de-anonymization power across entities, instead, we decouple the power of de-anonymization from the power of monitoring de-anonymization attempts. This allows for greater flexibility, particularly in the choice of the monitoring entities.

We show that our framework can be instantiated generically from threshold encryption schemes and succinct non-interactive zero-knowledge. We also show that the highly-efficient threshold group signature scheme by Camenisch et al. (SCN’20) can be modified and extended to instantiate our framework.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This work focuses on the application layer and not on the network layer. We assume that all users communicate over anonymous channels.

  2. 2.

    We note also that we separate the role of a key issuer who lets users join the group. Such a key issuer is assumed to be honest in the scope of our work, as we focus on anonymity of users and the accountability of the manager. Further research could be done for malicious key issuers and the security issues they present.

  3. 3.

    A threshold public-key encryption scheme is an encryption scheme where the secret key is split among n parties, and a cipher text can be decrypted only if at least t shares of the secret keys are used.

  4. 4.

    For simplicity in this paper, we consider only one set of guardians.

  5. 5.

    Chain quality \(\alpha _{l}\) means that in any sequence of l consecutive block at least \(\alpha \) fraction of them are added by honest parties.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain

    Vanesa Daza, Alexandros Zacharakis & Arantxa Zapico

  2. Cybercat, Quebec, USA

    Vanesa Daza

  3. North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA

    Abida Haque & Alessandra Scafuro

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  1. Vanesa Daza
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Correspondence to Abida Haque .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be’er Sheva, Israel

    Shlomi Dolev

  2. University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Jonathan Katz

  3. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be’er Sheva, Israel

    Amnon Meisels

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Daza, V., Haque, A., Scafuro, A., Zacharakis, A., Zapico, A. (2022). Mutual Accountability Layer: Accountable Anonymity Within Accountable Trust. In: Dolev, S., Katz, J., Meisels, A. (eds) Cyber Security, Cryptology, and Machine Learning. CSCML 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13301. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07689-3_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07689-3_24

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