K-anonymous multi-party secret handshakes

Anonymity-protection techniques are crucial for various commercial and financial transactions, where participants are worried about their privacy. On the other hand, authentication methods are also crucial for such interactions. Secret handshake is a relatively recent mechanism that facilitates privacy-preserving mutual authentication between communicating peers. In recent years, researchers have proposed a set of secret handshake schemes based on different assumptions about the credentials used: from one-time credentials to the more general PKI-like credentials. In this paper, we concentrate on k-anonymous secret handshake schemes based on PKI-like infrastructures. More specifically, we deal with the k-anonymous m-party (m > 2) secret handshake problem, which is significantly more involved than its two-party counterpart due to the following: When an honest user hand-shakes with m - 1 parties, it must be assured that these parties are distinct; otherwise, under the mask of anonymity a dishonest participant may clone itself in a single handshake session (i.e., assuming multiple personalities).