Sequential Aggregate Signatures with Lazy Verification from Trapdoor Permutations

Sequential aggregate signature schemes allow n signers, in order, to sign a message each, at a lower total cost than the cost of n individual signatures. We present a sequential aggregate signature scheme based on trapdoor permutations (e.g., RSA). Unlike prior such proposals, our scheme does not require a signer to retrieve the keys of other signers and verify the aggregate-so-far before adding its own signature. Indeed, we do not even require a signer to know the public keys of other signers! Moreover, for applications that require signers to verify the aggregate anyway, our schemes support lazy verification: a signer can add its own signature to an unverified aggregate and forward it along immediately, postponing verification until load permits or the necessary public keys are obtained. This is especially important for applications where signers must access a large, secure, and current cache of public keys in order to verify messages. The price we pay is that our signature grows slightly with the number of signers. We report a technical analysis of our scheme (which is provably secure in the random oracle model), a detailed implementation-level specification, and implementation results based on RSA and OpenSSL. To evaluate the performance of our scheme, we focus on the target application of BGPsec (formerly known as Secure BGP), a protocol designed for securing the global Internet routing system. There is a particular need for lazy verification with BGPsec, since it is run on routers that must process signatures extremely quickly, while being able to access tens of thousands of public keys. We compare our scheme to the algorithms currently proposed for use in BGPsec, and find that our signatures are considerably shorter nonaggregate RSA (with the same sign and verify times) and have an order of magnitude faster verification than nonaggregate ECDSA, although ECDSA has shorter signatures when the number of signers is small

A unified framework for trapdoor-permutation-based sequential aggregate signatures

We give a framework for trapdoor-permutation-based sequential aggregate signatures (SAS) that unifies and simplifies prior work and leads to new results. The framework is based on ideal ciphers over large domains, which have recently been shown to be realizable in the random oracle model. The basic idea is to replace the random oracle in the full-domain-hash signature scheme with an ideal cipher. Each signer in sequence applies the ideal cipher, keyed by the message, to the output of the previous signer, and then inverts the trapdoor permutation on the result. We obtain different variants of the scheme by varying additional keying material in the ideal cipher and making different assumptions on the trapdoor permutation. In particular, we obtain the first scheme with lazy verification and signature size independent of the number of signers that does not rely on bilinear pairings. Since existing proofs that ideal ciphers over large domains can be realized in the random oracle model are lossy, our schemes do not currently permit practical instantiation parameters at a reasonable security level, and thus we view our contribution as mainly conceptual. However, we are optimistic tighter proofs will be found, at least in our specific application.https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/070.pdfAccepted manuscrip

Research Philosophy of Modern Cryptography

Proposing novel cryptography schemes (e.g., encryption, signatures, and protocols) is one of the main research goals in modern cryptography. In this paper, based on more than 800 research papers since 1976 that we have surveyed, we introduce the research philosophy of cryptography behind these papers. We use ``benefits and ``novelty as the keywords to introduce the research philosophy of proposing new schemes, assuming that there is already one scheme proposed for a cryptography notion. Next, we introduce how benefits were explored in the literature and we have categorized the methodology into 3 ways for benefits, 6 types of benefits, and 17 benefit areas. As examples, we introduce 40 research strategies within these benefit areas that were invented in the literature. The introduced research strategies have covered most cryptography schemes published in top-tier cryptography conferences