12 May 2016 - Foteini Baldimtsi

Abstract

The benefits of electronic transactions are numerous, but they come with a price: the technologies used often overlook the privacy of their users. Achieving privacy in a digital world is a rather challenging problem, privacy-preserving solutions are harder to construct and, at the same time, are significantly more computationally intensive than privacy-intrusive ones. In this talk I show how to combine techniques from cryptography and systems security to get all the benefits of electronic transactions without sacrificing user privacy and without giving up efficiency.

I will focus on two major sub-domains of privacy-preserving technologies: anonymous credentials (the core ingredient to private authorization), and anonymous electronic payments. In the first part of my talk I will present Anonymous Credentials Light, the most efficient and provable secure anonymous credential scheme. In the second part, I will describe a privacy-preserving protocol for electronic payments and show an efficient smartphone implementation of it for the public transportation scenario.