Bachelor/Master Thesis
Exploring Distributed Threshold Issuance of Credentials
A recent line of research is exploring how to apply the benefit of a decentralized design to a credential system. A credential system supports the issuing of digital identities to allow primarily authentication and authorization policies for online services. In this contest, we refer to decentralization as a system whose governance is shared among multiple entities, i.e., blockchain. The shift of trust assumptions from one to a committee of servers allows for addressing privacy concerns derived from the well-established solution with a central trusted provider.
In this project, we aim to collect and understand the current state-of-the-art regarding decentralized solutions for credential issuance. We seek to systematize this knowledge in order to understand the following:
- Entities composing the system,
- properties that must be fulfilled in such systems,
- adversarial model that should be taken into consideration for real-world scenarios,
- cryptographic solutions employed.
Finally, we want to analyze whether current solutions meet such requirements and identify open questions and new lines of research.
Two prominent designs are CanDID[1] and Coconout[2].