Abstract

) Daniel Bleichenbacher and Ueli M. Maurer Institute for Theoretical Computer Science ETH Zurich CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland Email addresses: maurer@inf.ethz.ch, bleichen@inf.ethz.ch Abstract. The goals of this paper are to formalize and investigate the general concept of a digital signature scheme, based on a general one-way function without trapdoor, for signing a predetermined number of messages. It generalizes and unifies previous work of Lamport, Winternitz, Merkle, Even et al. and Vaudenay. The structure of the computation yielding a public key from a secret key corresponds to a directed acyclic graph G. A signature scheme for G can be defined as an antichain in the poset of minimal verifyable sets of vertices of G with the naturally defined computability relation as the order relation and where a set is verifyable if and only if the public key can be computed from the set. Several types of graphs are analyzed, results on the number of signatures of these schemes are presented ...

Citations