Time Stamped Proxy Blind Signature Scheme With Proxy Revocation Based on Discrete Logarithm Problem

Proxy blind signature combines both the properties of blind signature and proxy signature. In a proxy blind signature scheme, the proxy signer is allowed to generate a blind signature on behalf of the original signer. It is a protocol played by three parties in which a user obtains a proxy signer’s signature for a desired message and the proxy signer learns nothing about the message. During the verification of a proxy blind signature scheme, the verifier cannot get whether signing is within the delegation period or after delegation period. In this thesis a time stamped proxy blind signature scheme with proxy revocation is proposed which records the time stamp during the proxy signing phase and satisfies all the security properties of proxy blind signature i.e distinguishability, nonrepudiation, unforgeability, verifiability, identifiability, unlinkability, prevention of misuse. In a proxy revocation scheme, the original signer can terminate the delegation power of a proxy signer before the completion of delegation period. Proxy blind signature has wide applications in real life scenarios, such as, e-cash, e-voting and e-commerece applications

PROXY ADVISORS AS ISSUE SPOTTERS

When institutional investors hire proxy advisors to prepare reports on matters up for vote at public company shareholder meetings, are they interested primarily in acquiring a bottom-line recommendation on how to vote, on which they can then blindly rely? Or in acquiring information that will help them make their own voting decisions? Supporters of controversial reforms introduced by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2019 and 2020 gravitate toward the former position, arguing that reform is needed to discourage undue reliance on proxy advisor recommendations. Opponents gravitate toward the latter position, arguing that additional regulation generally is unnecessary given that institutional investors already review their proxy advisors’ work product and make their own voting decisions. This article argues that neither of these positions presents a full picture of proxy advisors’ role in shareholder voting, and puts forward a more nuanced account that better reflects existing empirical evidence: institutional investors tend to use proxy advisors first and foremost as issue spotters, helping them distinguish (i) controversial matters that require a review of the proxy advisor’s analysis and potentially other information sources from(ii) non-controversial matters where they can vote in line with the proxy advisor’s recommendation without undertaking further review. On this account, proxy advisors do influence shareholder voting, but this influence derives primarily from their ability to direct institutional investors’ attention away from some proposals and toward others, rather than from institutional investors’ following their recommendations in lockstep. This account casts one common criticism of proxy advisors’ standards—that they reflect a one-size-fits-all approach to corporate governance that results in recommendations that do not reflect each public company’s unique circumstances—in a new light that exposes potential problems unaddressed by the SEC’s reforms. At the same time, it casts doubt on the usefulness of many of the reforms introduced by the SEC, which appear to be predicated on the flawed assumption that blind reliance on proxy advisor recommendations is a serious problem

Verifying privacy by little interaction and no process equivalence

While machine-assisted verification of classical security goals such as confidentiality and authentication is well-established, it is less mature for recent ones. Electronic voting protocols claim properties such as voter privacy. The most common modelling involves indistinguishability, and is specified via trace equivalence in cryptographic extensions of process calculi. However, it has shown restrictions. We describe a novel model, based on unlinkability between two pieces of information. Specifying it as an extension to the Inductive Method allows us to establish voter privacy without the need for approximation or session bounding. The two models and their latest specifications are contrasted