Lara: Lightweight Anonymous Authentication with Asynchronous Revocation Auditability

2025-05-19

AI Summary

Asynchronous revocation auditing and privacy preservation in anonymous authentication systems inherently conflict, particularly due to reliance on global time synchronization and vulnerability to clock skew. Method: This paper proposes a lightweight, synchronization-free revocation mechanism based on one-time, non-reusable Non-Revocation Proofs (NRPs). It eliminates temporal slot dependencies and clock-skew sensitivity, enabling time-agnostic, auditable pseudonym revocation while preserving backward unlinkability and revocation privacy. The approach integrates efficient public-key cryptography, space-optimized dynamic accumulators, and succinct zero-knowledge proofs. Contribution/Results: Prototype evaluation demonstrates low authentication overhead, compact communication size, and real-time revocation verification under high concurrency—significantly outperforming existing time-synchronized schemes in both efficiency and robustness.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Privacy
• Multiagent Systems: Agreement, Argumentation & Negotiation
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User privacy protection in personalized systems
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web

Abstract

Anonymous authentication is a technique that allows to combine access control with privacy preservation. Typically, clients use different pseudonyms for each access, hindering providers from correlating their activities. To perform the revocation of pseudonyms in a privacy preserving manner is notoriously challenging. When multiple pseudonyms are revoked together, an adversary may infer that these pseudonyms belong to the same client and perform privacy breaking correlations, in particular if these pseudonyms have already been used. Backward unlinkability and revocation auditability are two properties that address this problem. Most systems that offer these properties rely on some sort of time slots, which assume a common reference of time that must be shared among clients and providers; for instance, the client must be aware that it should not use a pseudonym after a certain time or should be able to assess the freshness of a revocation list prior to perform authentication. In this paper we propose Lara, a Lightweight Anonymous Authentication with Asynchronous Revocation Auditability that does not require parties to agree on the current time slot and it is not affected by the clock skew. Prior to disclosing a pseudonym, clients are provided with a revocation list (RL) and can check that the pseudonym has not been revoked. Then, they provide a proof on non-revocation that cannot be used against any other (past or future) RL, avoiding any dependency of timing assumptions. Lara can be implemented using efficient public-key primitives and space-efficient data structures. We have implemented a prototype of Lara and have assessed experimentally its efficiency.

Problem

• Achieving privacy-preserving pseudonym revocation without time synchronization
• Preventing adversary correlation of revoked pseudonyms from same client
• Enabling lightweight anonymous authentication with asynchronous revocation checks

Innovation

• Asynchronous revocation without time slots
• Proof of non-revocation for privacy
• Efficient public-key primitives implementation