Welcome to the resource topic for 2006/066
Title:
Simple and Flexible Private Revocation Checking
Authors: John Solis, Gene Tsudik
Abstract:Digital certificates signed by trusted certification authorities (CAs) are used for multiple
purposes, most commonly for secure binding of public keys to names and other attributes of
their owners. Although a certificate usually includes an expiration time, it is not uncommon
that a certificate needs to be revoked prematurely. For this reason, whenever a client (user
or program) needs to assert the validity of another party’s certificate, it performs revocation
checking. There are many revocation techniques varying in both the operational model and
underlying data structures. One common feature is that a client typically contacts an on-line
third party (trusted, untrusted or semi-trusted), identifies the certificate of interest and obtains
some form of a proof of either revocation or validity (non-revocation) for the certificate in
question.
While useful, revocation checking can leak potentially sensitive information. In particular,
third parties of dubious trustworthiness discover two things: (1) the identity of the party posing
the query, as well as (2) the target of the query. The former can be easily remedied with
techniques such as onion routing or anonymous web browsing. Whereas, hiding the target of
the query is not as obvious. Arguably, a more important loss of privacy results from the
third party’s ability to tie the source of the revocation check with the query’s target. (Since,
most likely, the two are about to communicate.) This paper is concerned with the problem of
privacy in revocation checking and its contribution is two-fold: it identifies and explores the
loss of privacy inherent in current revocation checking, and, it constructs a simple, efficient and
flexible privacy-preserving component for one well-known revocation method.
ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2006/066
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