Paper 2006/389

Traceable Ring Signature

Eiichiro Fujisaki and Koutarou Suzuki

Abstract

The ring signature allows a signer to leak secrets anonymously, without the risk of identity escrow. At the same time, the ring signature provides great flexibility: No group manager, no special setup, and the dynamics of group choice. The ring signature is, however, vulnerable to malicious or irresponsible signers in some applications, because of its anonymity. In this paper, we propose a traceable ring signature scheme. A traceable ring scheme is a ring signature except that it can restrict ``excessive'' anonymity. The traceable ring signature has a tag that consists of a list of ring members and an issue that refers to, for instance, a social affair or an election. A ring member can make any signed but anonymous opinion regarding the issue, but only once (per tag). If the member submits another signed opinion, possibly pretending to be another person who supports the first opinion, the identity of the member is immediately revealed. If the member submits the same opinion, for instance, voting ``yes'' regarding the same issue twice, everyone can see that these two are linked. The traceable ring signature can suit to many applications, such as an anonymous voting on a BBS, a dishonest whistle-blower problem, and unclonable group identification. We formalize the security definitions for this primitive and show an efficient and simple construction.