Privacy-preserving Rental Services using One-show Anonymous Credentials

• Main Authors: YANG, Yanjiang, DENG, Robert H., Bao, Feng
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2009
• Subjects: anonymity; identity escrow; privacy; one-show anonymous credential; Information Security
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/741; http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/sec.97
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Rental services play an important part in our daily life and the trend has been towards digital transactions. Rental records contain lots of sensitive information on individuals, so if abused by rental service providers, users' privacy could be jeopardized. To mitigate this concern, we present privacy-preserving rental services where interests of both the users and the service provider are protected. Specifically, our system enables normal users to engage in a rental service in an anonymous manner, whereas users with overdue items are subject to anonymity revocation by the rental service provider; moreover, the rental service provider enforces a rental limit which caps the number of rentals per user under a prescribed limit. We propose a novel one-show anonymous credential scheme to realize the above design objectives. While this scheme is tailored to the scenario of online credential issuing in the proposed rental services, we believe that it is of independent interest and may find its use in other applications.