Paper 2025/1981

Vision: A Modular Framework for Anonymous Credential Systems

Abstract

Anonymous credentials enable the unlinkable presentation of previously attested information, or even only predicates thereof. They are a versatile tool and currently enjoy attention in various real-world applications, ranging from the European Digital Identity project to Privacy Pass. While each application usually requires their own tailored variant of anonymous credentials, they all share the same common blueprint. So far, this has not been leveraged though, and currently several proposals either targeting monolithic variants of core components such as BBS signatures, or application-specific protocols undergo standardization. This is clearly not optimal, as the same work gets repeated multiple times, while still risking ending up with many slight modifications of the same main idea and protocols. In this work we present our vision to use a modular approach to build anonymous credential systems: they are built from a core component – consisting of a commitment, signature and NIZK scheme – that can be extended with additional commitment-based modules in a plug-and-play manner. We sketch modules for pseudonyms, range proofs and device binding. Importantly, apart from the committed input, all modules are entirely independent of each other. We use this modularity to propose a concrete instantiation that uses BBS signatures for the core component and ECDSA signatures for device binding, addressing the need to bind modern credential schemes to legacy signatures in secure hardware elements.