Traceable Identity-Based Group Signature

¹ School of Computer and Communication Engineering, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha 410114, P.R. China
gk4572@163.com
² School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, P.R. China
³ School of Information Technology, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia

Received: 19 June 2016
Accepted: 19 September 2016

Abstract

Group signature is a useful cryptographic primitive, which makes every group member sign messages on behalf of a group they belong to. Namely group signature allows that group member anonymously signs any message without revealing his/her specific identity. However, group signature may make the signers abuse their signing rights if there are no measures of keeping them from abusing signing rights in the group signature schemes. So, group manager must be able to trace (or reveal) the identity of the signer by the signature when the result of the signature needs to be arbitrated, and some revoked group members must fully lose their capability of signing a message on behalf of the group they belong to. A practical model meeting the requirement is verifier-local revocation, which supports the revocation of group member. In this model, the verifiers receive the group member revocation messages from the trusted authority when the relevant signatures need to be verified. With the rapid development of identity-based cryptography, several identity-based group signature (IBGS) schemes have been proposed. Compared with group signature based on public key cryptography, IBGS can simplify key management and be used for more applications. Although some identity-based group signature schemes have been proposed, few identity-based group signature schemes are constructed in the standard model and focus on the traceability of signature. In this paper, we present a fully traceable (and verifier-local revocation) identity-based group signature (TIBGS) scheme, which has a security reduction to the computational Diffie–Hellman (CDH) assumption. Also, we give a formal security model for traceable identity-based group signature and prove that the proposed scheme has the properties of traceability and anonymity.