Anonymous Networking Meets Real-World Business Requirements

Ubiquitous systems and the Internet of Things (IoT) are on the rise. However, there are issues from businesses and users which hinder the wide-spread application of such systems. In the FP7 EU project ebbits, which deals with integrating IoT into business systems, we collected real-world requirements from participants. From these we designed a complete anonymous network solution including addressing, discovery, authentication and reputation management. Our authentication system relies on Non Interactive Zero Knowledge Proofs augmented for fine granulated access right decisions and accounting. Anonymous reputation is created using reputation tickets, which are obtained through public votings. A reputation ticket is an unforgeable evidence of trustworthiness held by the provider and presented to a consumer on request. Discovery also has to specially be designed for anonymous environments else they leak information about the identity. We provide an attribute based discovery mechanism built with Bloom-filters. Our concept protects privacy but still enables discovery based on partial matches.