Authors:
Louise Axon
and
Michael Goldsmith
Affiliation:
University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Keyword(s):
Public-key Infrastructure, Blockchain, Privacy-awareness, Security.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Applied Cryptography
;
Cryptographic Techniques and Key Management
;
Data and Application Security and Privacy
;
Data Engineering
;
Databases and Data Security
;
Identification, Authentication and Non-Repudiation
;
Information and Systems Security
;
Privacy
;
Security and Privacy in Pervasive/Ubiquitous Computing
;
Security Management
Abstract:
Conventional public-key infrastructure (PKI) designs using certificate authorities and web-of-trust are not
optimal and have security flaws. The properties afforded by the Bitcoin blockchain are a natural solution to
some of the problems with PKI - in particular, certificate transparency and elimination of single points-offailure.
Proposed blockchain-based PKI designs are built as public ledgers linking identity with public key,
providing no privacy. We consider cases requiring privacy-aware PKIs, which do not link identity with public
key. We show that blockchain technology can be used to construct a privacy-aware PKI while eliminating
some of the problems of conventional PKI, and present PB-PKI, a privacy-aware blockchain-based PKI.