Paper 2024/1301

Kalos: Hierarchical-auditable and Human-binding Authentication Scheme for Clinical Trial

Abstract

Clinical trials are crucial in the development of new medical treatment methods. To ensure the correctness of clinical trial results, medical institutes need to collect and process large volumes of participant data, which has prompted research on privacy preservation and data reliability. However, existing solutions struggle to resolve the trade-off between them due to the trust gap between the physical and digital worlds, limiting their practicality. To tackle the issues above, we present Kalos, a novel authentication scheme for clinical trials. Kalos leverages diversified cryptographic tools, such as card-based anonymous credential and zero-knowledge proof to achieve authentication with visual verification and selective disclosure of attributes. It has properties such as unforgeability, blindness, privacy preservation, and human-binding that support hierarchical auditability and data de-duplication to enhance the reliability of clinical trials. We then provide the security and performance analysis of Kalos to show its potential to be deployed in the medical consumer electronics scenario. The computational cost of the smartcard is irrespective of the number of certified attributes, and the total computational cost of Kalos is within tens of milliseconds with the commonly used number of attributes.