Paper 2013/408

Delegatable Functional Signatures

Michael Backes, Sebastian Meiser, and Dominique Schröder

Abstract

We introduce delegatable functional signatures (DFS) which support the delegation of signing capabilities to another party, called the evaluator, with respect to a functionality F. In a DFS, the signer of a message can choose an evaluator, specify how the evaluator can modify the signature without voiding its validity, allow additional input and decide how the evaluator can further delegate its capabilities. The main contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we propose DFS, a novel cryptographic primitive that unifies several seemingly different signature primitives, including functional signatures as defined by Boyle, Goldwasser, and Ivan (eprint 2013/401), sanitizable signatures, identity based signatures, and blind signatures. To achieve this unification, we present several definitions of unforgeability and privacy. Finding appropriate and meaningful definitions in this context is challenging due to the natural mealleability of DFS and due to the multi-party setting that may involve malicious keys. Second, we present a complete characterization of the instantiability of DFS under common assumptions, like the existence of one-way functions. Here, we present both positive and negative results. On the positive side we show that DFS not achieving our notion of privacy can be constructed from one-way functions. Furthermore, we show that unforgerable and private DFS can be constructed from doubly enhanced trapdoor permutations. On the negative side we show that the previous result is optimal regarding its underlying assumptions presenting an impossibility result for unforgeable private DFS from one-way permutations.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Public-key cryptography
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Unknown status
Keywords
Functional signaturesdelegatable functional signaturesmalleable signature schemes
Contact author(s)
ds @ ca cs uni-saarland de
History
2013-10-10: revised
2013-06-25: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2013/408
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2013/408,
      author = {Michael Backes and Sebastian Meiser and Dominique Schröder},
      title = {Delegatable Functional Signatures},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2013/408},
      year = {2013},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/408}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/408}
}
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