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International Conference on Information Security

ISC 2005: Information Security pp 149–163Cite as

Tracing-by-Linking Group Signatures

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 3650))

Abstract

In a group signature [19], any group member can sign on behalf of the group while remaining anonymous, but its identity can be traced in an future dispute investigation. Essentially all state-of-the-art group signatures implement the tracing mechnism by requiring the signer to escrow its identity to an Open Authority (OA) [2, 13, 4, 25, 5, 7, 24]. We call them Tracing-by-Escrowing (TbE) group signatures. One drawback is that the OA also has the unnecessary power to trace without proper cause. In this paper we introduce Tracing-by-Linking (TbL) group signatures. The signer’s anonymity is irrevocable by any authority if the group member signs only once (per event). But if a member signs twice, its identity can be traced by a public algorithm without needing any trapdoor. We initiate the formal study of TbL group signatures by introducing its security model, constructing the first examples, and give several applications. Our core construction technique is the successful transplant of the TbL technique from single-term offline e-cash from the blind signature framework [9, 22, 21] to the group signature framework. Our signatures have size O(1).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Information Engrg, Chinese Univ. of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

    Victor K. Wei

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  1. Victor K. Wei
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Cryptography and Security Department Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore

    Jianying Zhou

  2. Department of Information and Communication Technologies, University of A Coruña, Spain

    Javier Lopez

  3. School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University, Singapore

    Robert H. Deng

  4. Institute for Infocomm Research, 119613, Singapore

    Feng Bao

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Wei, V.K. (2005). Tracing-by-Linking Group Signatures. In: Zhou, J., Lopez, J., Deng, R.H., Bao, F. (eds) Information Security. ISC 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3650. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11556992_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11556992_11

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-29001-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31930-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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