Practical Attribute-based Signature: Traceability and Revocability
Jianghong Wei, Xinyi Huang, Wenfen Liu, Xuexian Hu · The Computer Journal · 2016
As a new variant of digital signature, attribute-based signature (ABS) is appealing for many scenarios, where both authentication and anonymity are desired. However, in such a paradigm, a user's secret key is not linkable to an authenticated identity, and the same set of attributes might be shared among multiple users. Consequently, a malicious user would leak his secret key for some purposes without the risk of being identified among these equal users. On the other hand, for a cryptosystem with a large number of users, there should be an efficient revocation mechanism to further inform that a user's credential is abolished. We note that none of the existing ABS schemes simultaneously supports traceability and revocability, which are crucial towards the practicability of ABS. In this work, we first give a formal security model for traceable and revocable ABS. Next, we provide a concrete construction that admits flexible threshold signing predicates. Finally, we prove the anonymity and traceability of the proposed scheme in the standard model. To the best of our knowledge, our construction is the first ABS scheme that enjoys the functionalities of traceability and revocability simultaneously, and thus is more feasible for practical applications.