Signature schemes and applications to cryptographic protocol design

Signature schemes are fundamental cryptographic primitives, useful as a stand-alone application, and as a building block in the design of secure protocols and other cryptographic objects. In this thesis, we study both the uses that signature schemes find in protocols, and the design of signature schemes suitable for a broad range of applications. An important application of digital signature schemes is an anonymous credential system. In such a system, one can obtain and prove possession of credentials without revealing any additional information. Such systems are the best means of balancing the need of individuals for privacy with the need of large organizations to verify that the people they interact with have the required credentials. We show how to construct an efficient anonymous credential system using an appropriate signature scheme; we then give an example of such asignature scheme. The resulting system is the first one with satisfactory communication and computation costs. The signature scheme we use to construct an anonymous credential system is of independent interest for use in other protocols. The special property of this signature scheme is that it admits an efficient protocol for a zero-knowledge proof of knowledge of a signature. Further, we consider the question of revocation of signatures. We obtain an efficient revocation scheme.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2002

Author dc:creator

• Lysyanskaya, Anna

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Ronald L. Rivest.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/29271

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/29271