A novel approach to privacy and traceability using attribute-based signature in decentralized identifier

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel scheme that enhances privacy and ensures accountability by mitigating signature-based correlation risks in decentralized identifiers (DIDs). Existing DIDs often rely on traditional digital signatures, making them vulnerable to attacks that link user identities across transactions. Our proposed scheme leverages attribute-based signatures (ABS) to provide anonymous authentication, preventing such correlation and protecting user privacy. To deter the abuse of anonymity, it incorporates a traceability mechanism, enabling authorized entities to trace a user’s DID when necessary. The scheme’s security, including anonymity and traceability, is formally proven under the random oracle model.

Keywords

Decentralized identifier / Attribute-based signature / Privacy / Anonymous authentication / Traceability

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Taehoon Kim: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Validation, Formal analysis, Conceptualization. Dahee Seo: Validation, Formal analysis, Conceptualization. Im-Yeong Lee: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Validation, Conceptualization. Su-Hyun Kim: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the IITP (Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation)-ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) grant funded by the Korea government (Ministry of Science and ICT) (IITP-2025-RS-2024-00438056) and the Technology Innovation Program (RS-2024-00443436) funded by the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy (MOTIE, Korea)

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