GrAC: Graph-Based Anonymous Credentials from Identity Graphs on Blockchain

Abstract

With the growing need for privacy and self-sovereign identity, traditional identity management relying on centralized data registries not only represents single points of failure but also lacks transparency and control over users' identity information. With the built-in tamper-proofness and transparency, blockchain has been widely studied to accommodate the challenges in traditional identity management. Still, it usually comes with privacy concerns due to its public accessibility. Anonymous credentials take advantage of the recent progress in zero-knowledge proof, allowing the unlinkable presentation of only the necessary attributes for a service to guarantee anonymity. However, the existing anonymous credentials require a secondary issuer to verify and manage the anonymized credentials, which compromises the overall transparency and causes indirect management of the user's identity. In this paper, we propose GrAC, a blockchain-based identity management system based on a novel identity graph, which allows users and identity providers to securely store and manage identity information on the blockchain without intermediate entities. GrAC also includes an anonymous authentication protocol suite based on zero-knowledge proof, allowing users to generate one-time anonymous credentials that selectively reveal minimal information to the service provider for authentication. The analysis and evaluations show that Gr Achas a reasonable overhead and provides adequate anonymity protection while removing the need for intermediate issuers.