A single public‐key authentication scheme for multiple users
Tatsuaki Okamoto · Systems and Computers in Japan · 1987
Abstract This paper proposes a new user authentication scheme, which does not require a management file for users' passwords. It has a high security, realizing the authentication of a large number of users by a single public key. Because of this property, the proposed system has merits in the application to off‐line and mutual authentication. The scheme is also useful in the authentication in a large system with a large number of users. The system is constructed using the public‐key digital signature and a oneway function with the commutative property. An example is presented where RSA is employed as the digital signature and the congruent exponential function is employed as the one‐way function. It is described that the security of the proposed system appears to be equivalent to that of RSA or the digital signature based on RSA. Following the same idea, a digital signature system is proposed, where the authentication of a large number of users can be performed by a single public‐key. A variation of the scheme is presented which has the same performance as the proposed scheme.