Direct Anonymous Attestation - a Signature Scheme Designed for TCG

Liqun Chen
HP Labs, Bristol


This talk will give an introduction to a signature scheme called DAA (direct anonymous attestation) which is concerned with both security and privacy issues. A DAA signature convinces a verifier that the corresponding message was signed by a qualified signer. It does this without revealing the identity of the signer. Compared with some existing signature schemes, such as group signatures, ring signatures etc, this scheme provides a variety of balances between security and privacy. Users are allowed to choose whether or not a particular verifier is able to link different signatures from the same signer for this verifier. The scheme has a security proof in the random oracle model based on the strong RSA assumption and the decision Diffie-Hellman assumption.

The scheme was designed for the Trusted Computing Group (TCG), formerly known as the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA). Each TCG platform has a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). The TPM is a tamper-resistant piece of hardware. The scheme offers assurance to an external partner that an attestation came from a genuine TPM without identifying the TPM. The scheme has been used in TCG TPM specification version 1.2. This is available at https://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org.

The content of the talk is joint work with Ernie Brickell and Jan Camenisch.