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

Abstract

Privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) allow to achieve user’s transactions unlinkability across different online Service Providers. However, current PETs fail to guarantee unlinkability against the Identity Provider (IdP), which becomes a single point of failure in terms of privacy and security, and therefore, might impersonate its users. To address this issue, OLYMPUS EU project establishes an interoperable framework of technologies for a distributed privacy-preserving identity management based on cryptographic techniques that can be applied both to online and offline scenarios. Namely, distributed cryptographic techniques based on threshold cryptography are used to split up the role of the Identity Provider (IdP) into several authorities so that a single entity is not able to impersonate or track its users. The architecture leverages PET technologies, such as distributed threshold-based signatures and privacy attribute-based credentials (p-ABC), so that the signed tokens and the ABC credentials are managed in a distributed way by several IdPs. This paper describes the Olympus architecture, including its associated requirements, the main building blocks and processes, as well as the associated use cases. In addition, the paper shows how the Olympus oblivious architecture can be used to achieve privacy-preserving M2M offline transactions between IoT devices.