Fast Keyed-Verification Anonymous Credentials on Standard Smart Cards

Cryptographic anonymous credential schemes allow users to prove their personal attributes, such as age, nationality, or the validity of a ticket or a pre-paid pass, while preserving their privacy, as such proofs are unlinkable and attributes can be selectively disclosed. Recently, Chase et al. (CCS 2014) observe that in such systems, a typical setup is that the credential issuer also serves as the verifier. They introduce keyed-verification credentials that are tailored to this setting. In this paper, we present a novel keyed-verification credential system designed for lightweight devices (primarily smart cards). By using a novel algebraic MAC based on Boneh-Boyen signatures, we achieve the most efficient proving protocol compared to existing schemes. To demonstrate the practicality of our scheme in real applications, including large-scale services such as public transportation or e-government, we present an implementation on a standard, off-the-shelf, Multos smart card. While using significantly higher security parameters than most existing implementations, we achieve performance that is more than 44% better than the current state-of-the-art implementation.