SA3: Self-adaptive anonymous authentication for dynamic authentication policies

Authentication is a procedure by which a client convinces the service provider about a claimed property under a given authentication policy. Anonymous authentication has an added property: protect the real identity of the client. In this paper, we study the situations with dynamic authentication policies, commonly seen in large scale systems such as cloud computing. While this is not a significant issue for classic authentication where client anonymity is not a concern, it will introduce an array of difficulties to anonymous authentication which have not been formally investigated. To address this issue, we propose the notion of SA3: Self-Adaptive Anonymous Authentication. The related models are presented together with a generic design from attribute-based signatures.