Updatable Anonymous Credentials and Applications to Incentive Systems

We introduce updatable anonymous credential systems (UACS) and use them to construct a new privacy-preserving incentive system. In a UACS, a user holding a credential certifying some attributes can interact with the corresponding issuer to update his attributes. During this, the issuer knows which update function is run, but does not learn the user's previous attributes. Hence the update process preserves anonymity of the user. One example for a class of update functions are additive updates of integer attributes, where the issuer increments an unknown integer attribute value v by some known value k. This kind of update is motivated by an application of UACS to incentive systems. Users in an incentive system can anonymously accumulate points, e.g. in a shop at checkout, and spend them later, e.g. for a discount. In this paper, we (1) formally define UACS and their security, (2) give a generic construction for UACS supporting arbitrary update functions, and (3) construct a new incentive system using UACS that is efficient while offering offline double-spending protection and partial spending.