Towards Practical Attribute-Based Signatures

Abstract

Abstract. An attribute-based signature (ABS) is a special digital signature created using a dynamic set of issued attributes. For instance, a doctor can sign a medical statement with his name, medical license number and medical speciality. These attributes can be verified along with the signature by any verifier with the correct public keys of the respective attribute issuers. This functionality not only makes ABS a much more flexible alternative to the standard PKI-based signatures, but also offers the ability to create privacy-preserving signatures. However, none of the ABS constructions presented in the literature is practical or easily realizable. In fact, to the best of our knowledge, there is currently no ABS implementation used in practice anywhere. This is why we put forward a new ABS technique based on the IRMA attribute-based authentication. IRMA already has an efficient and practical smart-card implementation, and an experimental smart-phone implementation too. They are currently used in several pilot projects. In this paper, we propose an ABS scheme based on the existing IRMA technology, extending the currently available IRMA devices with ABS functionality. We study the practical issues that arise due to the introduction of the signature functionality to an existing attribute-based authentication scheme, and we propose possible cryptographic and infrastructural solutions. We also discuss use cases and implementation aspects.

Attribute Based Signature Architecture for Transferring Digital Document

“…We analyzed the working capabilities of various attribute-based signature mechanisms in order to identify some outstanding issues. Generally speaking, the computational complexity and resource consumption of these algorithms [5,11] are quite high. Thus, a novel strategy is required to address the problems.…”

Auditable Anonymous Electronic Examination

“…The ABC4Trust consortium has also significantly advanced ABC systems and demonstrated their practicality through two pilot applications [26]. Another research direction focuses on more practical implementations of ABC systems, as seen in projects like IRMA [27] and IoT implementations [28,29].…”

Anonymous, Attribute Based, Decentralized, Secure, and Fair e-Donation

“…Some group signature schemes allow revocability [27,55]. On the other hand, again, the use of keys in those schemes cannot be easily bounded by a fixed value n. Attribute based signature (ABS) schemes [7,19,24,26,32,49,56,67] are non-interactive signature solutions for anonymous attribute policy proving. They provide binary attribute policy authentication (including Boolean relations).…”

“…The anonymous decentralized e-cash schemes [51,60] cannot be directly applied for the e-donation purpose, as they do not provide a mechanism for anonymous attribute-based money transfer between donors and recipients who are non-privy to each other. Also, it is non-trivial to directly combine these with the existing anonymous attribute proving techniques (e.g., anonymous credentials [14,15,17,18,23,31,48]), attribute based signatures [19,26,32,49,56,67], group signatures [5,16,27,35,55,62,71]), while satisfying the above-mentioned requirements. We note that even letting ICOs use anonymous cryptocurrencies (e.g., Zerocash [60]) does not help with all of our e-donation requirements.…”