Anonymous Signatures Revisited

Vishal Saraswat; Aaram Yun

Paper 2009/307

Anonymous Signatures Revisited

Vishal Saraswat and Aaram Yun

Abstract

We revisit the notion of the anonymous signature, first formalized by Yang, Wong, Deng and Wang, and then further developed by Fischlin, and Zhang and Imai. We present a new formalism of anonymous signature, where instead of the message, a part of the signature is withheld to maintain anonymity. We introduce the notion unpretendability to guarantee infeasibility for someone other than the correct signer to pretend authorship of the message and signature. Our definition retains applicability for all previous applications of the anonymous signature, provides stronger security, and is conceptually simpler. We give a generic construction from any ordinary signature scheme, and also show that the short signature scheme by Boneh and Boyen can be naturally regarded as such a secure anonymous signature scheme according to our formalism.

Note: We revised security definitions and modified the result about Boneh-Boyen accordingly. Also we reformulated our constructions in terms of commitment schemes.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Public-key cryptography
Publication info: Published elsewhere. A previous version is to be published in ProvSec 2009
Keywords: anonymous signature signature anonymity unpretendability
Contact author(s): aaramyun @ gmail com
History: 2009-10-12: revised; 2009-07-01: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2009/307
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2009/307,
      author = {Vishal Saraswat and Aaram Yun},
      title = {Anonymous Signatures Revisited},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2009/307},
      year = {2009},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2009/307}
}