Advanced Signatures
Olivier Sanders · 2022
Today, authentication massively relies on digital signature mechanisms that act as real electronic stamps. Today, there is a wide variety of advanced signature constructions that reflect the variety of environments and zero-knowledge proof protocols used in cryptography. This chapter describes some of these more specifically, those that are fairly representative of the state-of-the-art. It shows how they can be used to meet some needs using some primitives that are emblematic of cryptography for the protection of privacy. The notion of anonymous credentials is quite broad because in cryptography it covers all the solutions where a user obtains a certificate on its “attributes” from an entity, so as to then be able to convince, anonymously, any verifier that its attributes satisfy some conditions. It is difficult today to talk of anonymous authentication without mentioning group signatures, since this primitive has become so central within this domain.