1.
Lehmann, A., Özbay, C.: Multi-Signatures for Ad-hoc and Privacy-Preserving Group Signing. Public-Key Cryptography (PKC). pp. 196–228 (2024).
Multi-signatures allow to combine individual signatures from different signers on the same message into a short aggregated signature. Newer schemes further allow to aggregate the individual public keys, such that the combined signature gets verified against a short aggregated key. This makes them a versatile alternative to threshold or distributed signatures: the aggregated key can serve as group key, and signatures under that key can only be computed with the help of all signers. What makes multi-signatures even more attractive is their simple key management, as users can re-use the same secret key in several and ad-hoc formed groups. In that context, it will be desirable to not sacrifice privacy as soon as keys get re-used and ensure that users are not linkable across groups. In fact, when multi-signatures with key aggregation were proposed, it was claimed that aggregated keys hide the signers' identities or even the fact that it is a combined key at all. In our work, we show that none of the existing multi-signature schemes provide these privacy guarantees when keys get re-used in multiple groups. This is due to the fact that all known schemes deploy deterministic key aggregation. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new variant of multi-signatures with probabilistic yet verifiable key aggregation. We formally define the desirable privacy and unforgeability properties in the presence of key re-use. This also requires to adapt the unforgeability model to the group setting, and ensure that key-reuse does not weaken the expected guarantees. We present a simple BLS-based scheme that securely realizes our strong privacy and security guarantees. We also formalize and investigate the privacy that is possible by deterministic schemes, and prove that existing schemes provide the advertised privacy features as long as one public key remains secret.
2.
Ozbay, C., Levi, A.: Blacklisting Based Anonymous Authentication Scheme for Sharing Economy. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing. 1–18 (2023).
Authentication and blacklisting mechanisms have a key role for service providers to deliver the service to correct users through digital channels. Nevertheless, there always have been concerns about privacy of the users against such mechanisms. The conditional anonymity concept is proposed as a remedy to these concerns. A recent approach in the literature for conditional anonymity is blacklistable anonymous credentials, which allows service providers to blacklist users for an authentication session without identifying the user. In this paper, we improve user anonymity in conditionally anonymous schemes using two complementary mechanisms. First, we define whitelisting property for blacklistable anonymous credentials and give a construction of this scheme. The whitelisting property can be used to unlink an honestly behaved authentication session from the user. Second, we propose an extension of this scheme for a particular use case, sharing economy services. This scheme allows a service provider to blacklist a user only if the user have not returned the shared asset in due time. We benchmark the performance of our schemes by comparing them with the rival schemes. Our experiments show that both of our scheme have comparable performance to previous works.