Building Privacy-Preserving Cryptographic Credentials from Federated Online Identities

Abstract:

Third-party applications such as Quora or StackOverflow allow users to log in through a federated identity provider such as Facebook (Log in with Facebook), Google+ or Twitter. This process is called federated authentication. Examples of federated identity providers include social networks as well as other non-social network identity providers such as PayPal.

Federated identity providers have gained widespread popularity among users as a way to manage their online identity across the web. While protocols like OAuth and OpenID allow users to maintain a single set of credentials for federated authentication, such federated login can leak privacy-sensitive profile information, making the user’s online activity more easily tracked.

To protect themselves, users could forego using such identities altogether, or limit the content of their profiles. Ideally, users could leverage their federated identities but in a way as to prevent third party applications from accessing sensitive information. While anonymous authentication techniques have been proposed, their practicality depend on such technologies as PGP or complex encryption algorithms which most users lack the knowledge or motivation to use effectively.

While federated identity providers offer a convenient and increasingly popular mechanism for federated authentication, unfortunately, they also exacerbate many privacy and tracking risks. We present Crypto-Book, a privacy preserving layer enabling federated authentication while reducing these risks.

Crypto-Book relies on a set of independently managed servers that collectively assign each federated identity credentials (either a public/private keypair or blinded signed messages). We propose two components, ”credential producers” that create and issue clients with privacy preserving credentials, and ”credendial consumers” that verify these privacy preserving credentials for authentication of clients to third party applications.

The credential producer servers have split trust and use a (t,n)-threshold cryptosystem to collaboratively generate client credentials. Using their credentials, clients can then leverage anonymous authentication techniques such as linkable ring signatures or blind signatures to log into third party applications via credential consumers, while preserving privacy.

We have implemented our system and demonstrate its use with four distinct applications: a Wiki system, an anonymous group communication system, a whistle blower submission system based on SecureDrop, and a privacy preserving chat room system. Our results show that for anonymity sets of size 100 and 2048-bit DSA keys, Crypto-Book ring signature authentication takes 1.641s for signature generation by the client, 1.632s for signature verification on the server, and requires 8.761KB of communication bandwidth. Similarly for partially blind signature authentication, each phase takes under 0.05s and requires 0.325KB of bandwidth.

Crypto-Book is practical and has low overhead: We deployed a privacy preserving chat room system built on top of the Crypto-Book architecture. Within the deployment within our research group, Crypto-Book group authentication took 1.607s end- to-end, an overhead of 1.2s compared to traditional non privacy preserving federated authentication.

Ph.D. Thesis: PDF