European countries establish eID systems, while often debating the privacy benefits anonymous credential systems provide. Are these advanced systems feasible and efficient enough on a standard eID card?
Anonymous credential systems are a powerful primitive to establish privacy for the users as well as security guarantees for issuers and service providers. At IBM Research, we established the first anonymous credential system on a standard Java Card. The credential system was autonomous, that is, did not rely on help from the terminal, used strong key-sizes and was quite fast.
In fact, we realized the credential system on an eID specimen with some years old off-the-shelf hardware underneath.