[Resource Topic] 2024/2010: Anonymous credentials from ECDSA

Welcome to the resource topic for 2024/2010

Title:
Anonymous credentials from ECDSA

Authors: Matteo Frigo, abhi shelat

Abstract:

Anonymous digital credentials allow a user to prove possession of an attribute that has been asserted by an identity issuer without revealing any extra information about themselves. For example, a user who has received a digital passport credential can prove their “age is $>18$” without revealing any other attributes such as their name or date of birth.

Despite inherent value for privacy-preserving authentication, anonymous credential schemes have been difficult to deploy at scale.  Part of the difficulty arises because schemes in the literature, such as BBS+, use new cryptographic assumptions that require system-wide changes to existing issuer infrastructure.  In addition,  issuers often require digital identity credentials to be *device-bound* by incorporating the device’s secure element into the presentation flow.  As a result, schemes like BBS+ require updates to the hardware secure elements and OS on every user's device.

In this paper, we propose a new anonymous credential scheme for the popular and legacy-deployed Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) signature scheme.  By adding efficient zk arguments for statements about SHA256 and document parsing for ISO-standardized identity formats, our anonymous credential scheme is that first one that can be deployed *without* changing any issuer processes, *without* requiring changes to mobile devices, and *without* requiring non-standard cryptographic assumptions.

Producing ZK proofs about ECDSA signatures has been a bottleneck for other ZK proof systems because standardized curves such as P256 use finite fields which do not support efficient number theoretic transforms.  We overcome this bottleneck by designing a ZK proof system around sumcheck and the Ligero argument system, by designing efficient methods for Reed-Solomon encoding over the required fields, and by designing specialized circuits for ECDSA.
    
Our proofs for ECDSA can be generated in 60ms.  When incorporated into a fully standardized identity protocol such as the ISO MDOC standard, we can generate a zero-knowledge proof for the MDOC presentation flow in 1.2 seconds on mobile devices depending on the credential size. These advantages make our scheme a promising candidate for privacy-preserving digital identity applications.

ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/2010

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