SPROOF: A Decentralized Platform for Attribute-Based Authentication

TLDR: This paper presents a decentralized platform for signing and verifying digital documents that is based on the previously presented SPROOF platform and additionally supports attribute-based authentication.

Abstract: Paper documents are still very common for all types of records of personal achievements, ID cards and many other types documents issued to an individual or a company These paper documents, however, often come at the cost of expensive printing and issuing, loss of data or malicious counterfeits The origin and integrity is often hard or even impossible to be verified Digital signatures solve some of these issues, however, this still requires centralized trusted infrastructures and still does not allow for easy verification or recovery of lost documents Furthermore, attribute-based authentication is not possible with traditional signature schemes In this paper, we present a decentralized platform for signing and verifying digital documents that is based on the previously presented SPROOF platform and additionally supports attribute-based authentication This platform allows for issuing, managing and verifying digital documents in a public blockchain In the proposed approach, all data needed for verification of documents and issuers is stored decentralized, transparent, and integrity protected The platform is permissionless and thus no access restrictions apply Rather, following principles of the Web of Trust, issuers can confirm each other in a decentralized way Additionally, scalability and privacy issues are taken into consideration