Paper 2025/2156

Multi-Verifier Keyed-Verification Anonymous Credentials

Abstract

Keyed-Verification anonymous credentials (KVAC) enable privacy-preserving authentication and can be seen as the symmetric primitive of conventional anonymous credentials: issuance and verification of credentials requires a shared secret key. The core advantage of KVACs is that they can be realized without pairings, which still appears to be a significant bottleneck when it comes to real-world adoption. KVACs provide all the benefits from anonymous credentials, in particular multi-show unlinkability, but only work in the setting where the issuer and verifier are the same entity, limiting the applications they can be used in. In this work we extend the idea of keyed-verification credential to a setting where again multiple verifiers are supported, each sharing an individual secret key with the issuer. We formally introduce this as multi-verifier keyed-verification anonymous credentials (mKVACs). While users must now get verifier-specific credentials, each credential still provides multi-show unlinkability. In terms of security, mKVAC naturally strengthens the single-verifier variant, as it guarantees that corruption of any verifier does not impact unforgeability guarantees for other verifiers. The main challenge therein is to not trade this added flexibility for privacy, and hide the verifier's identity in the credential issuance. We provide formal definitions of all desired security and privacy features and propose a provably secure and pairing-free construction. Along the way, we develop a new KVAC-like primitive that authenticates group elements and offers statistical privacy, solving the open problem of combining multi-verifier support and pairing-freeness. Finally, we demonstrate practicality of our protocol via implementation benchmarks.