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Attack and improvements of fair quantum blind signature schemes

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Abstract

Blind signature schemes allow users to obtain the signature of a message while the signer learns neither the message nor the resulting signature. Therefore, blind signatures have been used to realize cryptographic protocols providing the anonymity of some participants, such as: secure electronic payment systems and electronic voting systems. A fair blind signature is a form of blind signature which the anonymity could be removed with the help of a trusted entity, when this is required for legal reasons. Recently, a fair quantum blind signature scheme was proposed and thought to be safe. In this paper, we first point out that there exists a new attack on fair quantum blind signature schemes. The attack shows that, if any sender has intercepted any valid signature, he (she) can counterfeit a valid signature for any message and can not be traced by the counterfeited blind signature. Then, we construct a fair quantum blind signature scheme by improved the existed one. The proposed fair quantum blind signature scheme can resist the preceding attack. Furthermore, we demonstrate the security of the proposed fair quantum blind signature scheme and compare it with the other one.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments that helped to improve the quality of this paper. This work is supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation (Nos. 61272058, 61073054, 60873055), the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province of China (Nos. 10251027501000004, S2012040007324, S2012010008833), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 10lgzd12), the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher School of Ministry of Education (No. 20100171110042), the Science and Technology Project of Jiangmen City of China (No. [2011]131), and the project of SQIG at IT, funded by FCT and EU FEDER projects Quantlog POCI/MAT/55796/2004 and QSec PTDC/EIA/67661/2006, IT Project QuantTel, NoE Euro-NF, and the SQIG LAP initiative.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mathematics and Computational Science, Wuyi University, Jiangmen, 529020, China

    Xiangfu Zou

  2. Department of Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510006, China

    Daowen Qiu

  3. SQIG—Instituto de Telecomunicações, Departamento de Matemática, Instituto Superior Técnico, TULisbon, Av. Rovisco Pais, 1049-001, Lisbon, Portugal

    Daowen Qiu

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  1. Xiangfu Zou
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Correspondence to Daowen Qiu.

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Zou, X., Qiu, D. Attack and improvements of fair quantum blind signature schemes. Quantum Inf Process 12, 2071–2085 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-012-0509-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-012-0509-1

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