Anonymous Credentials are digital credentials that offer strong privacy properties by leveraging Zero-Knowledge Proofs. Such constructions have been researched in academia for more than two decades, but seen few large-scale real-world deployments. Especially for the now emerging digital identity wallet ecosystems, anonymous credentials could improve the privacy properties and reduce infrastructure requirements of the overall system significantly.
This session summarizes the current state of the art of anonymous credentials, and will sketch the two general cryptographic approaches for such constructions. We will also present recent advances in research to overcome some of the limiting factors that have been preventing the adoption of anonymous credentials, especially the ability to bind such credentials to the hardware currently available in smartphones.
