Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2009/336

Partial Signatures and their Applications

Mihir Bellare and Shanshan Duan

Abstract: We introduce Partial Signatures, where a signer, given a message, can compute a ``stub'' which preserves her anonymity, yet later she, but nobody else, can complete the stub to a full and verifiable signature under her public key. We provide a formal definition requiring three properties, namely anonymity, unambiguity and unforgeability. We provide schemes meeting our definition both with and without random oracles. Our schemes are surprisingly cheap in both bandwidth and computation. We describe applications including anonymous bidding and betting.

Category / Keywords: Signatures, anonymity, hash functions

Date: received 9 Jul 2009, last revised 27 Aug 2011

Contact author: mihir at eng ucsd edu

Available formats: PDF | BibTeX Citation

Note: Previously titled ``New definitions and designs for anonymous signatures.''

Version: 20110828:041432 (All versions of this report)

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