Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2013/413

Policy-Based Signatures

Mihir Bellare and Georg Fuchsbauer

Abstract: We introduce policy-based signatures (PBS), where a signer can only sign messages conforming to some authority-specified policy. The main requirements are unforgeability and privacy, the latter meaning that signatures not reveal the policy. PBS offers value along two fronts: (1)~On the practical side, they allow a corporation to control what messages its employees can sign under the corporate key. (2)~On the theoretical side, they unify existing work, capturing others forms of signatures as special cases or allowing them to be easily built. Our work focuses on definitions of PBS, proofs that this challenging primitive is realizable for arbitrary policies, efficient constructions for specific policies, and a few representative applications.

Category / Keywords: Signatures, policies, group signatures, NIZKs, Groth-Sahai proofs, delegation.

Original Publication (with major differences): IACR-PKC-2014

Date: received 22 Jun 2013, last revised 22 Jan 2014

Contact author: georg fuchsbauer at ist ac at

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20140122:164552 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2013/413

Discussion forum: Show discussion | Start new discussion