Practical unconditionally secure signature schemes and related protocols

Ryan Amiri, Aysajan Abidin, Petros Wallden +1 more

Ryan Amiri, Erika Andersson

Signature schemes, proposed in 1976 by Diffie and Hellman, have become ubiquitous across modern communications. They allow for the exchange of messages from one sender to multiple recipients, with the guarantees that messages cannot be forged or tampered with and that messages also can be forwarded from one recipient to another without compromising their validity. Signatures are different from, but no less important than encryption, which ensures the privacy of a message. Commonly used signature protocols—signatures based on the Rivest–Adleman–Shamir (RSA) algorithm, the digital signature algorithm (DSA), and the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA)—are only computationally secure, similar to public key encryption methods. In fact, since these rely on the difficulty of finding discrete logarithms or factoring large primes, it is known that they will become completely insecure with the emergence of quantum computers. We may therefore see a shift towards signature protocols that will remain secure even in a post-quantum world. Ideally, such schemes would provide unconditional or information-theoretic security. In this paper, we aim to provide an accessible and comprehensive review of existing unconditionally securesecure signature schemes for signing classical messages, with a focus on unconditionally secure quantum signature schemes.

David Chaum, Saw Sandra Roijakkers

Jun Zhang, Hao Xiao, Hong-Qun Zhai +1 more

Blind signature has a wide range of applications in the fields of E-commerce and block-chain because it can effectively prevent the blind signer from getting the original message with its blindness. Owing to the potential unconditional security, quantum blind signature (QBS) is more advantageous than the classical ones. In this paper, an efficient and practical quantum blind signature scheme relaxed security model is presented, where quantum superposition, decoy qubits and hash function are used for the purpose of blindness. Compared with previous QBS scheme, the presented scheme is more efficient and practical with a relaxed security model, in which the signer’s dishonest behavior can be detected other than being prevented as in other QBS schemes.

Evgeniy O. Kiktenko, A. S. Zelenetsky, Aleksey K. Fedorov

Digital signatures are widely used for providing security of communications. At the same time, the security of currently deployed digital signature protocols is based on unproven computational assumptions. An efficient way to ensure an unconditional (information-theoretic) security of communication is to use quantum key distribution (QKD), whose security is based on laws of quantum mechanics. In this work we develop an unconditionally secure signature scheme that guarantees authenticity and transferability of arbitrary length messages in a QKD network. In the proposed setup, the QKD network consists of two subnetworks: (i) an internal network that includes the signer and with limitation on the number of malicious nodes and (ii) an external network that has no assumptions on the number of malicious nodes. A consequence of the absence of the trust assumption in the external subnetwork is the necessity of assistance from internal subnetwork recipients for the verification of message-signature pairs by external subnetwork recipients. We provide a comprehensive security analysis of the developed scheme, perform an optimization of the scheme parameters with respect to the secret key consumption, and demonstrate that the developed scheme is compatible with the capabilities of currently available QKD devices.

Jianhong Zhang, Wei Zou