Design of a Distributed Local Identification Scheme based on Zero-Knowledge Proofs

K. Motohashi, M. Kakuta, K. Yamaoka, T. Itoh, and Y. Sakai (Japan)

Keywords

Services and Security, Network Security, identification, ZKIP, authentication, authorization

Abstract

In distributed network systems, it is practical to establish authentication schemes for a group of users. This enables the system to realize a mechanism by which it discrimi nates users by authentication, and permits them to use the computing and/or network resources. In this paper, we propose a new distributed local identification scheme that achieves such a mechanism, i.e., a scheme that is based on zero-knowledge proofs. To show the availability of the pro posed scheme, we also discuss a scheme based on public key cryptosystems and compare the performance of the two systems. We first design those two distributed local identi fication schemes and then analyze the performance of these schemes with respect to security level, time complexity, communication complexity, and space complexity, to ver ify the availability of the scheme based on zero-knowledge proofs. By the analysis, we observe that for the scheme based on zero-knowledge proofs, the communication com plexity is dominant of the overall performance but for the scheme based on public-key cryptosystems, the time com plexity is dominant of the overall performance. As a result, we show that the scheme based on zero-knowledge proofs is more advantageous than the scheme based on public-key cryptosystems, especially when a broadband network is ac cessible.

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