International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 17 May 2016

Andrew Egbert, Brad Chun, Thomas Otte
ePrint Report ePrint Report
In this short technical summary, the authors describe how the mathematical primitives of Ring Confidential Transactions may be used to provide anonymous identity authentication services in a similar manner to "Anonrep" but in a trustless (or permissioned), distributed manner, and with the additional security and resilience provided by a blockchain. The use of the mathematics in the RingCT paper additionally, and importantly, allows for combining different types of authentication in a seamless manner, in essence if the Bitcoin or Monero blockchain is a single "thread," then the protocol here allows one to "weave" such threads together. The resulting protocol is dubbed an "Identity Chain" and provides anonymous authentication working in a lightweight and interoperable manner between any number of different service providers running different identity chains.
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