Single sign-on (SSO) allows a user to maintain only the credential at the identity provider (IdP), instead of one credential for each relying party (RP), to login to numerous RPs. However, SSO introduces extra privacy leakage threats, as (a) the IdP could track all the RPs which a user is visiting, and (b) collusive RPs could learn a user's online profile by linking his identities across these RPs. Several privacy-preserving SSO solutions have been proposed to defend against either the curious IdP or collusive RPs, but none of them addresses both of these privacy leakage threats at the same time. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving SSO system, called UPPRESSO, to protect a user's login traces against both the curious IdP and collusive RPs simultaneously. We analyze the identity dilemma between the SSO security requirements and these privacy concerns, and convert the SSO privacy problems into an identity-transformation challenge. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first practical SSO solution which solves the privacy problems caused by both the curious IdP and collusive RPs. We build the UPPRESSO prototype system for web applications, with standard functions of OpenID Connect, while the function of Core Sign-On is slightly modified to calculate the transformed identities. The prototype system is implemented on top of open-source MITREid Connect, and the extensive evaluation shows that UPPRESSO introduces reasonable overheads and fulfills the requirements of both security and privacy.
View on arXiv@article{guo2025_2110.10396,
title={ UPPRESSO: Untraceable and Unlinkable Privacy-PREserving Single Sign-On Services },
author={ Chengqian Guo and Jingqiang Lin and Quanwei Cai and Wei Wang and Wentian Zhu and Jiwu Jing and Qiongxiao Wang and Bin Zhao and Fengjun Li },
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.10396},
year={ 2025 }
}