Since the appearance of public-key cryptography in the seminal Diffie-Hellman paper, many new schemes have been proposed and many have been broken. Thus, the

Abstract. We present a new protocol that allows two players to ex-change digital signatures over the Internet in a fair way, so that either each player gets the other’s signature, or neither player does. The ob-vious application is where the signatures represent items of value, for example, an electronic check or airline ticket. The protocol can also be adapted to exchange encrypted data. The protocol relies on a trusted third party, but is “optimistic, ” in that the third party is only needed in cases where one player attempts to cheat or simply crashes. A key feature of our protocol is that a player can always force a timely and fair termination, without the cooperation of the other player. 1

Abstract. We describe a digital signature scheme in which the public key is fixed but the secret signing key is updated at regular intervals so as to provide a forward security property: compromise of the current secret key does not enable an adversary to forge signatures pertaining to the past. This can be useful to mitigate the damage caused by key exposure without requiring distribution of keys. Our construction uses ideas from the Fiat-Shamir and Ong-Schnorr identification and signature schemes, and is proven to be forward secure based on the hardness of factoring, in the random oracle model. The construction is also quite efficient. 1

For many proofs of knowledge it is important that only the verifier designated by the confirmer can obtain any conviction of the correctness of the proof. A good example of such a situation is for undeniable signatures, where the confirmer of a signature wants to make sure that only the intended verifier(s) in fact can be convinced about the validity or invalidity of the signature. Generally, authentication of messages and off-the-record messages are in conflict with each other. We show how, using designation of verifiers, these notions can be combined, allowing authenticated but private conversations to take place. Our solution guarantees that only the specified verifier can be convinced by the proof, even if he shares all his secret information with entities that want to get convinced. Our solution is based on trap-door commitments [4], allowing the designated verifier to open up commitments in any way he wants. We demonstrate how a trap-door commitment scheme can be used to constr...

We describe efficient techniques for a number of parties to jointly generate an RSA key. At the end of the protocol an RSA modulus N = pq is publicly known. None of the parties know the factorization of N. In addition a public encryption exponent is publicly known and each party holds a share of the private exponent that enables threshold decryption. Our protocols are efficient in computation and communication. All results are presented in the honest but curious settings (passive adversary).

We improve the Bellare-Miner (Crypto ’99) construction of signature schemes with forward security in the random oracle model. Our scheme has significantly shorter keys and is, therefore, more practical. By using a direct proof technique not used for forward-secure schemes before, we are able to provide better security bounds for the original construction as well as for our scheme. Bellare and Miner also presented a method for constructing such schemes without the use of the random oracle. We conclude by proposing an improvement to their method and an

Abstract. We propose the first forward-secure signature scheme for which both signing and verifying are as efficient as for one of the most efficient ordinary signature schemes (Guillou-Quisquater [GQ88]), each requiring just two modular exponentiations with a short exponent. All previously proposed forward-secure signature schemes took significantly longer to sign and verify than ordinary signature schemes. Our scheme requires only fractional increases to the sizes of keys and signatures, and no additional public storage. Like the underlying [GQ88] scheme, our scheme is provably secure in the random oracle model. 1

Abstract. This paper provides either security proofs or attacks for a large number of identity-based identification and signature schemes defined either explicitly or implicitly in existing literature. Underlying these are a framework that on the one hand helps explain how these schemes are derived, and on the other hand enables modular security analyses, thereby helping to understand, simplify and unify previous work. 1

Digital signing is at the heart of Internet based transactions and e-commerce. In this global communication environment, signature computation will be frequently performed on a relatively insecure device (e.g., a mobile phone) that cannot be trusted to completely (and at all times) maintain the secrecy of the private key.

The Fiat-Shamir paradigm for transforming identification schemes into signature schemes has been popular since its introduction because it yields efficient signature schemes, and has been receiving renewed interest of late as the main tool in deriving forward-secure signature schemes. In this paper, minimal (meaning necessary and sufficient) conditions on the identification scheme to ensure security of the signature scheme in the random oracle model are determined, both in the usual and in the forward-secure cases. Specifically, it is shown that the signature scheme is secure (resp. forward-secure) against chosen-message attacks in the random oracle model if and only if the underlying identification scheme is secure (resp. forward-secure) against impersonation under passive (i.e., eavesdropping only) attacks, and has its commitments drawn at random from a large space. An extension is proven incorporating a random seed into the Fiat-Shamir transform so that the commitment space assumption may be removed. Keywords: Signature schemes, identification schemes, Fiat-Shamir transform, forward security,