Paper 2025/1334

On the use of ECDSA with hierarchical public key delegation in identity-based scenarios

Abstract

In 2009, Galindo and Garcia proposed the usage of concatenated Schnorr signatures for the hierarchical delegation of public keys, creating a quite efficient identity-based signature scheme (IBS). Essentially, the scheme builds upon the Schnorr signature scheme to generate a primary signature, part of which is then used as a secret key to produce signatures on subsequent messages. The resulting IBS is proven secure against existential forgery on adaptive chosen-message and adaptive identity attacks using variants of the Forking Lemma. In this paper, our goal is to answer the following question: would it be feasible to build upon the widely used elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) scheme to obtain a similarly secure and efficient IBS? We answer this affirmatively, opening interesting possibilities not only for identity-based signatures with ECDSA but also for applications such as secure credential delegation. This latter application is of particular interest considering the wide support for ECDSA in web- and cloud-oriented authentication systems (e.g., based on JSON Web Tokens). The resulting scheme is proven secure, combining the Bijective Random Oracle model and the existential unforgeability game in an identity-based setup. Our results show that even considering ECDSA's non-linear characteristic and more convoluted verification process when compared to Schnorr signatures, it is possible to obtain shorter signatures than Galindo-Garcia's scheme.