Protocol specification, technical overview and requirements document

[jbonisteel]

Due date: May 30

This activity involves the survey of the current cryptographic techniques related to anonymous credentials, VOPRFs, and algebraic MACs that are already deployed and which may be relevant to OONI’s use case.

We will build some possible threat models with different trade-offs between privacy and authenticity, and formalize them in terms of security experiments that will relate to the current scientific literature. We will identify the rough size of the anonymity sets for each possible solution.

Output: the detailed requirements of the anonymous credential system.

We will design a protocol that meets the requirement, possibly with algorithmic improvements over the published literature for the designed use case. Based on the survey of previous literature (activity 2.3) and the constraints imposed by our threat model (activity 2.1), we are going to lay out a theoretical protocol design that will meet these requirements. In order to do so, we will employ provable security techniques and develop informal proofs of security guaranteeing that the security of the system can be related to standard, computationally-hard problems.

Output: a technical overview document with a sketch of a proof of security.

We will write up a specification for the protocol and share it with domain experts to collect their feedback.

Output: protocol specification document.

[hellais]

Activity 2.1 Define the requirements for the system

This activity involves the survey of the current cryptographic techniques related to anonymous credentials, VOPRFs, and algebraic MACs that are already deployed and which may be relevant to OONI’s use case.

We will build some possible threat models with different trade-offs between privacy and authenticity, and formalize them in terms of security experiments that will relate to the current scientific literature. We will identify the rough size of the anonymity sets for each possible solution.

Activity 2.3 Design the protocol

We will design a protocol that meets the requirement, possibly with algorithmic improvements over the published literature for the designed use case. Based on the survey of previous literature (activity 2.3) and the constraints imposed by our threat model (activity 2.1), we are going to lay out a theoretical protocol design that will meet these requirements. In order to do so, we will employ provable security techniques and develop informal proofs of security guaranteeing that the security of the system can be related to standard, computationally-hard problems.

Activity 2.4 Write protocol specification

We will write up a specification for the protocol and share it with domain experts to collect their feedback.