Verifiable signature sharing

  • Authors:
  • Matthew K. Franklin;Michael K. Reiter

  • Affiliations:
  • AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey;AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey

  • Venue:
  • EUROCRYPT'95 Proceedings of the 14th annual international conference on Theory and application of cryptographic techniques
  • Year:
  • 1995

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Abstract

We introduce Verifiable Signature Sharing (VΣS), a cryptographic primitive for protecting digital signatures. VΣS enables the holder of a digitally signed document, who may or may not be the original signer, to share the signature among a set of proxies so that the honest proxies can later reconstruct it. We present efficient VΣS schemes for exponentiation based signatures (e.g., RSA, Rabin) and discrete log based signatures (e.g., ElGamal, Schnorr, DSA) that can tolerate the malicious (Byzantine) failure of the sharer and a constant fraction of the proxies. We also describe our implementation of these schemes and evaluate their performance. Among the applications of VΣS is the incorporation of digital cash into multiparty protocols, e.g., to enable cash escrow and secure distributed auctions.