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Anonymous Webs of Trust

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Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 6205))

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Abstract

Webs of trust constitute a decentralized infrastructure for establishing the authenticity of the binding between public keys and users and, more generally, trust relationships among users. This paper introduces the concept of anonymous webs of trust – an extension of webs of trust where users can authenticate messages and determine each other’s trust level without compromising their anonymity. Our framework comprises a novel cryptographic protocol based on zero-knowledge proofs, a symbolic abstraction and formal verification of our protocol, and a prototypical implementation based on the OpenPGP standard. The framework is capable of dealing with various core and optional features of common webs of trust, such as key attributes, key expiration dates, existence of multiple certificate chains, and trust measures between different users.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Michael Backes, Stefan Lorenz, Matteo Maffei & Kim Pecina

  2. Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), Germany

    Michael Backes

Authors
  1. Michael Backes
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  2. Stefan Lorenz
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  3. Matteo Maffei
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  4. Kim Pecina
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, 305 North University Street, IN 47907, 2107, West Lafayete, USA

    Mikhail J. Atallah

  2. Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Minnesota, MN 55455, Minneapolis, USA

    Nicholas J. Hopper

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Backes, M., Lorenz, S., Maffei, M., Pecina, K. (2010). Anonymous Webs of Trust. In: Atallah, M.J., Hopper, N.J. (eds) Privacy Enhancing Technologies. PETS 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6205. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14527-8_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14527-8_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-14526-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-14527-8

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