Privacy-preserving Rental Services using One-show Anonymous Credentials

Publication Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

3-2009

Abstract

Rental services play an important part in our daily life and the trend has been towards digital transactions. Rental records contain lots of sensitive information on individuals, so if abused by rental service providers, users' privacy could be jeopardized. To mitigate this concern, we present privacy-preserving rental services where interests of both the users and the service provider are protected. Specifically, our system enables normal users to engage in a rental service in an anonymous manner, whereas users with overdue items are subject to anonymity revocation by the rental service provider; moreover, the rental service provider enforces a rental limit which caps the number of rentals per user under a prescribed limit. We propose a novel one-show anonymous credential scheme to realize the above design objectives. While this scheme is tailored to the scenario of online credential issuing in the proposed rental services, we believe that it is of independent interest and may find its use in other applications.

Keywords

anonymity, identity escrow, privacy, one-show anonymous credential

Discipline

Information Security

Research Areas

Information Security and Trust

Publication

Security and Communication Networks

Volume

2

Issue

6

First Page

531

Last Page

545

ISSN

1939-0122

Identifier

10.1002/sec.97

Publisher

Wiley

Additional URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/sec.97

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