Not Yet Another Digital ID: Privacy-preserving Humanitarian Aid Distribution

This repository includes the prototype implementations used to evaluate the designs in the paper "Not Yet Another Digital ID: Privacy-preserving Humanitarian Aid Distribution" by Boya Wang, Wouter Lueks, Justinas Sukaitis, Vincent Graf Narbel, and Carmela Troncoso, presented at IEEE S&P 2023. The conference version will be available soon, in the mean time, you can find the full arXiv version here.

Abstract Humanitarian aid-distribution programs help bring physical goods to people in need. Traditional paper-based solutions to support aid distribution do not scale to large populations and are hard to secure. Existing digital solutions solve these issues, at the cost of collecting large amount of personal information. This lack of privacy can endanger recipients' safety and harm their dignity. In collaboration with the International Committee of the Red Cross, we build a safe digital aid-distribution system. We first systematize the requirements such a system should satisfy. We then propose a decentralized solution based on the use of tokens that fulfils the needs of humanitarian organizations. It provides scalability and strong accountability, and, by design, guarantees the recipients' privacy. We provide two instantiations of our design, on a smart card and on a smartphone. We formally prove the security and privacy properties of these solutions, and empirically show that they can operate at scale.

Purpose of This Repository

This repository serves two purposes:

1. Capture the prototype implementations for the two solutions we proposed in the paper, i.e., the smart-card-based solution and the smartphone-based solution, and

2. Document how to reproduce the measurements on the prototypes as written in the evaluation section of the paper

Structure of This Repository

• smartcard/ contains the instructions on implementing and evaluating the smart-card prototype

• smartphone/ contains the instructions on implementing and evaluating the smartphone prototype

How to Cite

@inproceedings{WangLSGT23,
  author    = {Boya Wang and
               Wouter Lueks and
               Justinas Sukaitis and
               Vincent Graf Narbel and
               Carmela Troncoso},
  title     = {{Not Yet Another Digital ID: Privacy-preserving Humanitarian Aid Distribution}},
  year      = {2023},
  booktitle = {{IEEE S&P}},
  note      = {To appear},
}

Contributors

The smart-card prototype was implemented by Laurent Girod and Lorenzo Rovati. The smartphone prototype was implemented by Laurent Girod and Nathan Duchenese.