Crypto-Book: Bootstrapping Privacy Preserving Online Identities from Social Networks
John Maheswaran, Daniel Jackowitz, David Isaac Wolinsky, Lining Wang,, and Bryan Ford

TL;DR
Crypto-Book introduces a privacy-preserving layer for online identities that enables cross-site authentication using social network identities, reducing privacy risks through distributed key management and anonymous signatures.
Contribution
It presents a novel system combining federated identity management with anonymous authentication techniques to enhance privacy in online social networks.
Findings
Prototype implementation demonstrates practical performance for real-world applications.
Supports anonymous authentication with manageable computational and bandwidth costs.
Enables privacy-preserving cross-site login for social network users.
Abstract
Social networking sites supporting federated identities offer a convenient and increasingly popular mechanism for cross-site authentication. Unfortunately, they also exacerbate many privacy and tracking risks. We propose Crypto-Book, an anonymizing layer enabling cross-site authentication while reducing these risks. Crypto-Book relies on a set of independently managed servers that collectively assign each social network identity a public/private keypair. Only an identity's owner learns all the private key shares, and can therefore construct the private key, while all participants can obtain any user's public key, even if the corresponding private key has yet to be retrieved. Having obtained an appropriate key set, a user can then leverage anonymous authentication techniques such as linkable ring signatures to log into third-party web sites while preserving privacy. We have…
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Taxonomy
TopicsInternet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting · Cryptography and Data Security · Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
