Publications
CanDID: Can-Do Decentralized Identity with Legacy Compatibility, Sybil-Resistance, and Accountability
Work published in IEEE Syposium on Security and Privacy 2021.
Abstract:
We present CanDID, a platform for practical, user- friendly realization of decentralized identity, the idea of empow- ering end users with management of their own credentials.
While decentralized identity promises to give users greater control over their private data, it burdens users with management of private keys, creating a significant risk of key loss. Existing and proposed approaches also presume the spontaneous availability of a credential-issuance ecosystem, creating a bootstrapping problem. They also omit essential functionality, like resistance to Sybil attacks and the ability to detect misbehaving or sanctioned users while preserving user privacy.
CanDID addresses these challenges by issuing credentials in a user-friendly way that draws securely and privately on data from existing, unmodified web service providers. Such legacy compatibility similarly enables CanDID users to leverage their existing online accounts for recovery of lost keys. Using a decentralized committee of nodes, CanDID provides strong confidentiality for user’s keys, real-world identities, and data, yet prevents users from spawning multiple identities and allows identification (and blacklisting) of sanctioned users.
We present the CanDID architecture and report on experiments demonstrating its practical performance.
FabZK: Supporting Privacy-Preserving, Auditable Smart Contracts in Hyperledger Fabric
Work published in IEEE International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) 2019.
Abstract:
On a Blockchain network, transaction data are exposed to all participants. To preserve privacy and confidentiality in transactions, while still maintaining data immutability, we design and implement FabZK. FabZK conceals transaction details on a shared ledger by storing only encrypted data from each transaction (e.g., payment amount), and by anonymizing the transactional relationship (e.g., payer and payee) between members in a Blockchain network. It achieves both privacy and auditability by supporting verifiable Pedersen commitments and constructing zero-knowledge proofs. FabZK is implemented as an extension to the open source Hyperledger Fabric. It provides APIs to easily enable data privacy in both client code and chaincode. It also supports on-demand, automated auditing based on encrypted data. Our evaluation shows that FabZK offers strong privacy-preserving capabilities, while delivering reasonable performance for the applications developed based on its framework.