A Study on the Applicability of Anonymous Authentication Schemes for Fine-Grained Privacy Protection

As information communication technologies have highly advanced, a large amount of user sensitive information can be easily collected and unexpectedly distributed. For user-friendly services, a service provider requires and processes more user information. However known privacy protection models take on a passive attitude toward user information protection and often involve serious weaknesses. In reality, information exposure by unauthorised access and mistakenly disclosure occurs frequently. In this paper, we study on the applicability of anonymous authentication services for fine-grained user privacy protection. We analyze authentication schemes and classify them according to the level of privacy newly defined in this paper. In addition, we identify security requirements that a privacy protection scheme based on anonymous authentication can achieve within legal boundary.