Private Handshakes

TL;DR

This paper introduces efficient private handshaking protocols that enable users to privately verify membership in one or multiple secret groups without revealing their identities or group memberships, enhancing privacy in mutual authentication.

Contribution

It extends existing private handshaking protocols to support multiple group memberships and provides simple, efficient implementations suitable for resource-constrained environments.

Findings

Protocols support multiple group memberships simultaneously

Implementations are efficient for resource-constrained devices

Protocols enable private mutual authentication without revealing group info

Abstract

Private handshaking allows pairs of users to determine which (secret) groups they are both a member of. Group membership is kept secret to everybody else. Private handshaking is a more private form of secret handshaking, because it does not allow the group administrator to trace users. We extend the original definition of a handshaking protocol to allow and test for membership of multiple groups simultaneously. We present simple and efficient protocols for both the single group and multiple group membership case. Private handshaking is a useful tool for mutual authentication, demanded by many pervasive applications (including RFID) for privacy. Our implementations are efficient enough to support such usually resource constrained scenarios.