Rui Shi, Huamin Feng, Yang Yang, Zhen Guo, Chunjie Cao, Rebert H. Deng
Abstract
Incentive (or point) systems are widely deployed across industries such as retail, tourism, and finance to enhance customer loyalty and create benefits for service providers. However, their operation typically requires the collection and processing of sensitive customer data, leading to significant privacy concerns. Existing privacy-preserving incentive systems predominantly rely on bilinear pairings and the discrete logarithm assumption, which, while efficient in classical settings, are vulnerable to quantum adversaries and thus lack long-term security guarantees. To address this limitation, we present LatInc, a practical lattice-based privacy-preserving incentive system. LatInc integrates state-of-the-art lattice-based signatures with efficient protocols, the ABDLOP commitment, and efficient lattice zero-knowledge proofs, achieving a robust balance between post-quantum security and efficiency. Relying on the hardness of the MLWE and MSIS problems, we formally prove that LatInc achieves unforgeability, anonymity, and framing-resistance in the random oracle model. We implement a demo of the system and evaluate its performance on a standard laptop platform. Experimental results show that the communication overheads for the Earning and Spending protocols are approximately 99 KB and 140 KB, respectively, with execution times of 610 ms and 900 ms, highlighting significant efficiency gains over previous lattice-based incentive constructions.
Citation format
SHI, Rui, et al. Latinc: A practical lattice-based privacy-preserving incentive system. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2026.