The OLYMPUS Architecture-Oblivious Identity Management for Private User-Friendly Services

Area of Science:

• Computer Science
• Cybersecurity
• Cryptography

Background:

• Current privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) offer transaction unlinkability but fail against Identity Providers (IdPs), creating a single point of failure for user privacy and security.
• IdPs can potentially impersonate or track users due to centralized control over identity information.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present the OLYMPUS EU project's interoperable framework for distributed, privacy-preserving identity management.
• To address the limitations of existing PETs by decentralizing the role of the IdP using cryptographic techniques.

Main Methods:

• Utilizes distributed cryptographic techniques, specifically threshold cryptography, to distribute the IdP's role among multiple authorities.
• Leverages PETs such as distributed threshold-based signatures and privacy attribute-based credentials (p-ABC) for managing signed tokens and credentials across multiple IdPs.
• Describes the OLYMPUS architecture, its requirements, building blocks, processes, and use cases.

Main Results:

• The OLYMPUS architecture effectively splits the IdP's role, preventing any single entity from impersonating or tracking users.
• Enables distributed management of signed tokens and p-ABC credentials, enhancing user privacy and security.
• Demonstrates the applicability of the OLYMPUS architecture for privacy-preserving Machine-to-Machine (M2M) offline transactions in IoT environments.

Conclusions:

• The OLYMPUS framework provides a robust solution for distributed identity management, enhancing user unlinkability against IdPs.
• The proposed architecture is applicable to both online and offline scenarios, offering a versatile approach to privacy preservation.
• The OLYMPUS oblivious architecture facilitates secure and private M2M offline transactions, particularly relevant for the growing IoT ecosystem.