  Electronic tickets (e-tickets) are electronic versions of paper tickets,
which enable users to access intended services and improve services'
efficiency. However, privacy may be a concern of e-ticket users. In this paper,
a privacy-preserving electronic ticket scheme with attribute-based credentials
is proposed to protect users' privacy and facilitate ticketing based on a
user's attributes. Our proposed scheme makes the following contributions: (1)
users can buy different tickets from ticket sellers without releasing their
exact attributes; (2) two tickets of the same user cannot be linked; (3) a
ticket cannot be transferred to another user; (4) a ticket cannot be double
spent; (5) the security of the proposed scheme is formally proven and reduced
to well known (q-strong Diffie-Hellman) complexity assumption; (6) the scheme
has been implemented and its performance empirically evaluated. To the best of
our knowledge, our privacy-preserving attribute-based e-ticket scheme is the
first one providing these five features. Application areas of our scheme
include event or transport tickets where users must convince ticket sellers
that their attributes (e.g. age, profession, location) satisfy the ticket price
policies to buy discounted tickets. More generally, our scheme can be used in
any system where access to services is only dependent on a user's attributes
(or entitlements) but not their identities.
