Achieving optimal anonymity in transferable e-cash with a judge

  • Authors:
  • Olivier Blazy;Sébastien Canard;Georg Fuchsbauer;Aline Gouget;Hervé Sibert;Jacques Traoré

  • Affiliations:
  • École Normale Supérieure, CNRS, INRIA, Paris, France;Orange Labs, Applied Crypto Group, Caen, France;University of Bristol, Dept. Computer Science, UK;Gemalto, Security Lab, Meudon, France;ST-Ericsson, Le Mans, France;Orange Labs, Applied Crypto Group, Caen, France

  • Venue:
  • AFRICACRYPT'11 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Progress in cryptology in Africa
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Electronic cash (e-cash) refers to money exchanged electronically. The main features of traditional cash are usually considered desirable also in the context of e-cash. One such property is off-line transferability, meaning the recipient of a coin in a transaction can transfer it in a later payment transaction to a third person without contacting a central authority. Among security properties, the anonymity of the payer in such transactions has been widely studied. This paper proposes the first efficient and secure transferable e-cash scheme with the strongest achievable anonymity properties, introduced by Canard and Gouget. In particular, it should not be possible for adversaries who receive a coin to decide whether they have owned that coin before. Our proposal is based on two recent cryptographic primitives: the proof system by Groth and Sahai, whose randomizability enables strong anonymity, and the commuting signatures by Fuchsbauer, which allow one to sign values that are only given as encryptions.