Exploiting cryptography for privacy-enhanced access control: A result of the PRIME Project

TLDR

Daily interactions increasingly occur over electronic media, and the EC‑funded PRIME project envisions secure, privacy‑controlled interactions in this information society. The project demonstrates that privacy‑enhancing technologies can build a user‑controlled identity management system close to PRIME’s vision, presenting key results, motivating the need for such systems, and outlining their core principles. The system relies on anonymous credentials and policy languages that fully exploit their advanced functionality. The combination of anonymous credentials and policy languages allows users to transact online while revealing only the strictly necessary personal information.

Abstract

We conduct more and more of our daily interactions over electronic media. The EC-funded project PRIME (Privacy and Identity Management for Europe) envisions that individuals will be able to interact in this information society in a secure and safe way while retaining control of their privacy. The p roject had set out to prove that existing privacy-enhancing technologies allow for the construction of a user-controlled identity management system that comes surprisingly close to this vision. This paper describes two key elements of the PRIME identity management systems: anonymous credentials and policy languages that fully exploit the advanced functionality offered by anonymous credentials. These two key elements enable the users to carry out transactions, e.g., over the Internet, revealing only the strictly necessary personal information. Apart from presenting for the first time these two key results, this paper also motivates the need for privacy enhancing identity management, gives concrete requirements for such a system and then describes the key principles of the PRIME identity management solution.