Privacy-PAC: Privacy-Enhanced Physical Access Control

The cryptographic privacy-enhancing technologies were originally designed to improve the privacy and digital identity protection in electronic applications, such as cloud services, private Internet databases or communication systems. However, the access to buildings can be controlled in a privacy-respecting way too. In this paper, we introduce the privacy-enhanced physical access control system (Privacy-PAC) based on cryptographic attribute-based authentication protocols. Using the Privacy-PAC, it is possible to control the physical access to restricted areas while respecting the privacy of users. Besides the cryptographic design, we also describe the implementation results on the platforms of smart phones and an embedded verification terminal.