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Stronger Security and Constructions of Multi-Designated Verifier Signatures

Authors:
Ivan Damgård
Helene Haagh
Rebekah Mercer
Anca Nitulescu
Claudio Orlandi
Sophia Yakoubov
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Abstract: Off-the-Record (OTR) messaging is a two-party message authentication protocol that also provides plausible deniability: there is no record that can later convince a third party what messages were actually sent. The challenge in group OTR, is to enable the sender to sign his messages so that group members can verify who sent a message (signatures should be unforgeable, even by group members). Also, we want the off-the-record property: even if some verifiers are corrupt and collude, they should not be able to prove the authenticity of a message to any outsider. Finally, we need consistency, meaning that if any group member accepts a signature, then all of them do. To achieve these properties it is natural to consider Multi-Designated Verifier Signatures (MDVS). However, existing literature defines and builds only limited notions of MDVS, where (a) the off-the-record property (source hiding) only holds when all verifiers could conceivably collude, and (b) the consistency property is not considered. The contributions of this paper are two-fold: stronger definitions for MDVS, and new constructions meeting those definitions. We strengthen source-hiding to support any subset of corrupt verifiers, and give the first formal definition of consistency. We build three new MDVS: one from generic standard primitives (PRF, key agreement, NIZK), one with concrete efficiency and one from functional encryption.
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BibTeX
@article{tcc-2020-30603,
  title={Stronger Security and Constructions of Multi-Designated Verifier Signatures},
  booktitle={Theory of Cryptography},
  publisher={Springer},
  author={Ivan Damgård and Helene Haagh and Rebekah Mercer and Anca Nitulescu and Claudio Orlandi and Sophia Yakoubov},
  year=2020
}