International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Anonymous rate-limited tokens are a special type of credential that can be used to improve the efficiency of privacy-preserving authentication systems like Privacy Pass. In such a scheme, a user obtains a "token dispenser" by interacting with an issuer, and the dispenser allows the user to create up to a pre-determined number $k$ of unlinkable and publicly verifiable tokens. Unlinkable means that one should not be able to tell that two tokens originate from the same dispenser, but also they cannot be linked to the interaction that generated the dispenser. Furthermore, we can limit the rate at which these tokens are created by linking each token to a context (e.g., the service we are authenticating to), and imposing a limit $N \leq k$ such that seeing more than $N$ tokens for the same context will reveal the identity of the user. Constructions of such tokens were first given by Camenisch, Hohenberger and Lysyanskaya (EUROCRYPT '05) and Camenisch, Hohenberger, Kohlweiss, Lysyanskaya, and Meyerovich (CCS '06).

In this work, we present the first construction of \emph{everlasting} anonymous rate-limited tokens, for which unlinkability holds against computationally unbounded adversaries, whereas other security properties (e.g., unforgeability) remain computational. Our construction relies on pairings. While several parameters in our construction unavoidably grow with $k$, the key challenge we resolve is ensuring that the complexity of dispensing a token is independent of the parameter $k$.

We are motivated here by the goal of providing solutions that are robust to potential future quantum attacks against the anonymity of previously stored tokens. A construction based on post-quantum secure assumptions (e.g., based on lattices) would be rather inefficient---instead, we take a pragmatic approach dispensing with post-quantum security for properties not related to privacy.