Paper 2011/104

Unconditionally Secure Signature Schemes Revisited

Colleen M. Swanson and Douglas R. Stinson

Abstract

Unconditionally secure signature (USS) schemes provide the ability to electronically sign documents without the reliance on computational assumptions needed in traditional digital signatures. Unlike digital signatures, USS schemes require both different signing and different verification algorithms for each user in the system. Thus, any viable security definition for a USS scheme must carefully treat the subject of what constitutes a valid signature. That is, it is important to distinguish between signatures that are created using a user's signing algorithm and signatures that may satisfy one or more user verification algorithms. Moreover, given that each verifier has his own distinct verification algorithm, a USS scheme must necessarily handle the event of a disagreement. In this paper, we present a new security model for USS schemes that incorporates these notions, as well as give a formal treatment of dispute resolution and the trust assumptions required. We provide formal definitions of non-repudiation and transferability in the context of dispute resolution, and give sufficient conditions for a USS scheme to satisfy these properties. Finally, we give an analysis of the construction of Hanaoka et al. in our security model.

Note: Full version of paper accepted to ICITS 2011.