SoK: Descriptive Statistics Under Local Differential Privacy
Measuring Conditional Anonymity - A Global Study
The realm of digital health is experiencing a global surge, with mobile applications extending their reach into various facets of daily life. From tracking daily eating habits and vital functions to monitoring sleep patterns and even the menstrual cycle, these apps have become ubiquitous in their pursuit of comprehensive health insights. Many of these apps collect sensitive data and promise users to protect their privacy - often through pseudonymization. We analyze the real anonymity that users can expect by this approach and report on our findings. More concretely:
- We introduce the notion of conditional anonymity sets derived from statistical properties of the population.
- We measure anonymity sets for two real-world applications and present overarching findings from 39 countries.
- We develop a graphical tool for people to explore their own anonymity set. One of our case studies is a popular app for tracking the menstruation cycle.
Our findings for this app show that, despite their promise to protect privacy, the collected data can be used to identify users up to groups of 5 people in 97% of all the US counties, allowing the de-anonymization of the individuals. Given that the US Supreme Court recently overturned abortion rights, the possibility of determining individuals is a calamity.
Foundations of Adaptor Signatures
Adaptor signatures extend the functionality of regular signatures through the computation of pre-signatures on messages for statements of NP relations. Pre-signatures are publicly verifiable; they simultaneously hide and commit to a signature of an underlying signature scheme on that message. Anybody possessing a corresponding witness for the statement can adapt the pre-signature to obtain the „regular“ signature. Adaptor signatures have found numerous applications for conditional payments in blockchain systems, like payment channels (CCS'20, CCS'21), private coin mixing (CCS'22, SP'23), and oracle-based payments (NDSS'23). In our work, we revisit the state of the security of adaptor signatures and their constructions. In particular, our two main contributions are:
Security Gaps and Definitions: We review the widely-used security model of adaptor signatures due to Aumayr et al. (ASIACRYPT'21), and identify gaps in their definitions that render known protocols for private coin-mixing and oracle-based payments insecure. We give simple counterexamples of adaptor signatures that are secure w.r.t. their definitions, but result in insecure instantiations of these protocols. To fill these gaps, we identify a minimal set of modular definitions that align with these practical applications.
Secure Constructions: Despite their popularity, all known constructions are (1) derived from identification schemes via the Fiat-Shamir transform in the random oracle model or (2) require modifications to the underlying signature verification algorithm, thus making the construction useless in the setting of cryptocurrencies. More concerningly, all known constructions were proven secure w.r.t. the insufficient definitions of Aumayr et al., leaving us with no provably-secure adaptor signature scheme to use in applications.
We salvage all current applications by proving security of the widely-used Schnorr adaptor signatures under our proposed definitions. We also provide several new constructions including presenting the first adaptor signature schemes for Camenisch-Lysyanskaya (CL), Boneh-Boyen-Shacham (BBS+), and Waters signatures; all of which are proven secure in the standard model. Our new constructions rely on a new abstraction of digital signatures, called dichotomic signatures, which covers the essential properties we need to build adaptor signatures. Proving security of all constructions (including identification-based schemes) relies on a novel non-black-box proof technique which is of independent interest.