A server-aided verification signature scheme without random oracles

Server-aided verification(SAV) signature is useful for power-constrained devices since a powerful server can assist in performing costly operations such as pairing operations. Wu et al. [13] defined three security notions for SAV protocol to prevent a server from convincing a verifier that an invalid signature is valid. Security against strong collusion attack provides the strongest security guarantee among these notions. They [13] constructed SAV protocols that meet the requirement of these notions respectively. But they did not provide concrete running time to show that the running time of a verifier in their SAV protocol is strictly less than that of a verifier in the original verification protocol. In addition, a problem left open by their work is to design SAV signature which is unforgeable without random oracles as well as sound against strong collusion attack. To address the above issues, we first choose to design a SAV protocol called SAV-Hofheinz for a short signature proposed by Hofheinz unforgeable in the standard model. Then we implement SAV-Hofheinz by the PBC library and shows that the running time of a verifier in SAV-Hofheinz is strictly less than that of a verifier in the verification protocol of Hofheinz short signature

Authentication under Constraints

Authentication has become a critical step to gain access to services such as on-line banking, e-commerce, transport systems and cars (contact-less keys). In several cases, however, the authentication process has to be performed under challenging conditions. This thesis is essentially a compendium of five papers which are the result of a two-year study on authentication in constrained settings. The two major constraints considered in this work are: (1) the noise and (2) the computational power. For what concerns authentication under noisy conditions, Paper A and Paper B ad- dress the case in which the noise is in the authentication credentials. More precisely, the aforementioned papers present attacks against biometric authentication systems, that exploit the inherent variant nature of biometric traits to gain information that should not be leaked by the system. Paper C and Paper D study proximity- based authentication, i.e., distance-bounding protocols. In this case, both of the constraints are present: the possible presence of noise in the channel (which affects communication and thus the authentication process), as well as resource constraints on the computational power and the storage space of the authenticating party (called the prover, e.g., an RFID tag). Finally, Paper E investigates how to achieve reliable verification of the authenticity of a digital signature, when the verifying party has limited computational power, and thus offloads part of the computations to an untrusted server. Throughout the presented research work, a special emphasis is given to privacy concerns risen by the constrained conditions

Anonymous Single-Round Server-Aided Verification

Server-Aided Verification (SAV) is a method that can be employed to speed up the process of verifying signatures by letting the verifier outsource part of its computation load to a third party. Achieving fast and reliable verification under the presence of an untrusted server is an attractive goal in cloud computing and internet of things scenarios. In this paper, we describe a simple framework for SAV where the interaction between a verifier and an untrusted server happens via a single-round protocol. We propose a security model for SAV that refines existing ones and includes the new notions of SAV-anonymity and extended unforgeability. In addition, we apply our definitional framework to provide the first generic transformation from any signature scheme to a single-round SAV scheme that incorporates verifiable computation. Our compiler identifies two independent ways to achieve SAV-anonymity: computationally, through the privacy of the verifiable computation scheme, or unconditionally, through the adaptibility of the signature scheme. Finally, we define three novel instantiations of SAV schemes obtained through our compiler. Compared to previous works, our proposals are the only ones which simultaneously achieve existential unforgeability and soundness against collusion

Provably secure server-aided verification signatures

AbstractA server-aided verification signature scheme consists of a digital signature scheme and a server-aided verification protocol. With the server-aided verification protocol, some computational tasks for a signature verification are carried out by a server, which is generally untrusted; therefore, it is very useful for low-power computational devices. In this paper, we first define three security notions for server-aided verification signatures, i.e., existential unforgeability, security against collusion attacks and security against strong collusion attacks. The definition of existential unforgeability includes the existing security requirements in server-aided verification signatures. We then present, on the basis of existing signature schemes, two novel existentially unforgeable server-aided verification signature schemes. The existential unforgeability of our schemes can be formally proved both without the random oracle model and using the random oracle model. We also consider the security of server-aided verification signatures under collusion attacks and strong collusion attacks. For the first time, we formally define security models for capturing (strong) collusion attacks, and propose concrete server-aided verification signature schemes that are secure against such attacks