A new privacy-preserving authentication protocol for anonymous web browsing

摘要

Anonymous authentication technique receiveswide attention in recent years since it can protect users' privacy. Anonymous web browsing refers to utilization of theWorldWideWeb that hides a user's personally identifiable information from thewebsites visited. Even if a user can hide the IP address and other physical information with anonymity programs such as Tor, the web server can always monitor the user on the basis of the identity. In this paper, we firstly give an overview and cryptanalysis on the protocol ofYang et al and point out the security weaknesses of their protocol. Then, we propose a new authentication protocol for anonymous web browsing. In the proposed protocol, we take the advantages of a pseudo identity mechanism and an identity-based elliptic curve cryptography algorithm to achieve user anonymity, robust security, and high efficiency. The result of security analysis and performance evaluation indicate the feasibility and practicality of our proposed anonymous authentication protocol.