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A Note on the Invisibility and Anonymity of Undeniable Signature Schemes

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Information Security Applications (WISA 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 11897))

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Abstract

Undeniable signature is a special featured digital signature which can only be verified with the help of the signer. Undeniable signature should satisfy invisibility which implies the inability of a user to determine the validity of a message and signature pair as introduced by Chaum et al. Galbraith and Mao later proposed the notion of anonymity which implies the infeasibility to determine which user has issued the signature. They also proved that the notions of invisibility and anonymity are equivalent when the signers possess the same signature space, such that if an undeniable signature possesses invisibility, then it also possesses anonymity, and vice versa. In this paper, we show that in contradiction to the equivalency result established by Galbraith and Mao, there exist some undeniable signature schemes that possess invisibility but not anonymity. This motivates us to find out whether there is a limitation on Galbraith and Mao’s equivalency result or the schemes are actually flawed. Our analysis shows that the anonymity property requires all signers to possess the same signature space but the invisibility property does not. This conforms to the equivalency result and implies that an undeniable signature scheme can be invisible but not anonymous if the signers possess the different signature spaces. Our result invalidates two past cryptanalysis on undeniable signature schemes.

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Acknowledgement

The authors would like to acknowledge the Malaysia government’s Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (FRGS/1/2018/ICT04/MMU/01/01) for supporting this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Multimedia University, Melaka, Malaysia

    Jia-Ch’ng Loh & Swee-Huay Heng

  2. School of Computing, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Syh-Yuan Tan

  3. Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Ibaraki University, Hitachi, Ibaraki, 316-8511, Japan

    Kaoru Kurosawa

Authors
  1. Jia-Ch’ng Loh
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  2. Swee-Huay Heng
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  3. Syh-Yuan Tan
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  4. Kaoru Kurosawa
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Correspondence to Swee-Huay Heng .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Soonchunhyang University, Asan, Korea (Republic of)

    Ilsun You

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Loh, JC., Heng, SH., Tan, SY., Kurosawa, K. (2020). A Note on the Invisibility and Anonymity of Undeniable Signature Schemes. In: You, I. (eds) Information Security Applications. WISA 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11897. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39303-8_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39303-8_9

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