Paper 2010/358

The Fiat--Shamir Transform for Group and Ring Signature Schemes

M. -F. Lee, N. P. Smart, and B. Warinschi

Abstract

The Fiat-Shamir (FS) transform is a popular tool to produce particularly efficient digital signature schemes out of identification protocols. It is known that the resulting signature scheme is secure (in the random oracle model) if and only if the identification protocol is secure against passive impersonators. A similar results holds for constructing ID-based signature schemes out of ID-based identification protocols. The transformation had also been applied to identification protocols with additional privacy properties. So, via the FS transform, ad-hoc group identification schemes yield ring signatures and identity escrow schemes yield group signature schemes. Unfortunately, results akin to those above are not known to hold for these latter settings and the security of the resulting schemes needs to be proved from scratch, or worse, it is often simply assumed. Therefore, the security of the schemes obtained this way does not clearly follow from that of the base identification protocol and needs to be proved from scratch. Even worse, some papers seem to simply assume that the transformation works without proof. In this paper we provide the missing foundations for the use of the FS transform in these more complex settings.We start with defining a formal security model for identity escrow schemes (a concept proposed earlier but never rigorously formalized). Our main result constists of necessary and sufficient conditions for an identity escrow scheme to yield (via the FS transform) a secure group signature schemes. In addition, we discuss several variants of this result that account for the constructions of group signatures that fulfill weaker notions of security. In addition, using the similarity between group and ring signature schemes we give analogous results for the latter primitive.