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Post-Quantum Privacy Pass via Post-Quantum Anonymous Credentials

Vamsi Policharla, Bas Westerbaan, Armando Faz-Hernandez, Christopher A. Wood
Real World Crypto Symposium 2023. Tokyo, Japan. March 2023.
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Abstract

It is known that one can generically construct a post-quantum anonymous credential scheme, supporting the showing of arbitrary predicates on its attributes using general-purpose zero-knowledge proofs secure against quantum adversaries [Fischlin, CRYPTO 2006].
Traditionally, such a generic instantiation is thought to come with impractical sizes and performance. We show that with careful choices and optimizations, such a scheme can perform surprisingly well.
In fact, it performs competitively against state-of-the-art post-quantum blind signatures, for the simpler problem of post-quantum unlinkable tokens, required for a post-quantum version of Privacy Pass.

To wit, a post-quantum Privacy Pass constructed in this way using zkDilithium, our proposal for a STARK-friendly variation on Dilithium2, allows for a trade-off between token size (85–175KB) and generation time (0.3–5s) with a proof security level of 115 bits. Verification of these tokens can be done in 20–30ms. We argue that these tokens are reasonably practical, adding less than a second upload time over traditional tokens, supported by a measurement study.

Finally, we point out a clear advantage of our approach: the flexibility afforded by the general purpose zero-knowledge proofs. We demonstrate this by showing how we can construct a rate-limited variant of Privacy Pass that doesn't not rely on non-collusion for privacy.