An Architecture for Privacy-ABCs

One of the main objectives of the ABC4Trust project was to define a common, unified architecture for Privacy-ABC systems to allow comparing their respective features and combining them into common platforms. The chapter presents an overview of features and concepts of Privacy-ABCs and introduces the architecture proposed by ABC4Trust, describing the layers and components as well as the highlevel APIs. We also present the language framework of ABC4Trust through an example scenario. Furthermore, this chapter investigates integration of Privacy-ABCs with the existing Identity Management protocols and also analyses the required trust relationships in the ecosystem of Privacy-ABCs. As we mentioned in the previous chapter, there are several implementations of Privacy-ABCs, based on different cryptographic primitives. Even though these schemes have similar features, they are realized with different cryptographic mechanisms and many times they are even called differently, making these technologies hard to understand and compare. Their differences and complexity also makes it difficult for application developers to use them in practice and it is almost impossible to switch between them once the application has been deployed. The ABC4Trust architecture presented in this chapter aims to overcome these problems by defining an abstract interface to Privacy-ABCs, in such a way that they are independent from the concrete algorithms or cryptographic components used Patrik Bichsel, Jan Camenisch, Maria Dubovitskaya, Robert R. Enderlein, Stephan Krenn, Anja Lehmann, Gregory Neven, and Franz-Stefan Preiss IBM Research – Zurich, Switzerland, e-mail: {pbi,jca,mdu,enr,skr,anj,nev,frp}@