Protecting Online Identity Through Cryptography

A new startup, Credentica, hopes to offer the ability for you to perform secure transactions using the smallest amount of personal information possible. Their goal is to both protect privacy and enhance security, which they hope will be a mutually inclusive process. "The technique employs secure multi-party computation, a branch of cryptography that can calculate meaningful answers about secret information by knowing only some non-revealing clues about that secret. The underlying theory was demonstrated in 1982 by Andrew Yao in the so-called Millionaire's Problem [...] U-Prove employs an ID token, a special kind of digital certificate that allows for minimal selective disclosure. The tokens can store all kinds of information, but users can disclose only the minimum amount of data required in any given transaction. They leave no unwanted data trails and permit both anonymity and pseudonymity."

Comments

Book pointer

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

For people who want background or just enjoy math, Brands's book is Rethinking Public Key Infrastructure.

Re:Book pointer

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM has developed IDEMIX, a pseudonymous credential system. It work on the same principle and is going to be contributed to the Eclipse project as open source! http://www.zurich.ibm.com/security/idemix/ There is some white papers for those interested in the techno background.