Coconut: Threshold Issuance Selective Disclosure Credentials with Applications to Distributed Ledgers

https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07344

Alberto Sonnino, Mustafa Al-Bassam, Shehar Bano, Sarah Meiklejohn, George Danezis
(Submitted on 20 Feb 2018 (v1), last revised 8 Aug 2018 (this version, v3))

Coconut is a novel selective disclosure credential scheme supporting distributed threshold issuance, public and private attributes, re-randomization, and multiple unlinkable selective attribute revelations. Coconut integrates with blockchains to ensure confidentiality, authenticity and availability even when a subset of credential issuing authorities are malicious or offline. We implement and evaluate a generic Coconut smart contract library for Chainspace and Ethereum; and present three applications related to anonymous payments, electronic petitions, and distribution of proxies for censorship resistance. Coconut uses short and computationally efficient credentials, and our evaluation shows that most Coconut cryptographic primitives take just a few milliseconds on average, with verification taking the longest time (10 milliseconds).

cc: #research #coconutdeath #darkcrystal #dark-crystal #blockchain #chainspace @Dave Hrycyszyn @peg @kieran @kieran-two

Seems coconuts were in the air last year! Will ask Dave and George how they arrived at the name!