Server-aided signatures verification secure against collusion attack

Abstract

Wireless handheld devices which support e-mail and web browsing are increasingly popular. The authenticity of the information received is important, especially for business uses. In server-aided verification (SAV), a substantial part of the verification computation can be offloaded to a powerful but possibly untrusted server. This allows resource-constrained devices to enjoy the security guarantees provided by cryptographic schemes, such as pairing-based signatures, which may be too heavyweight to verify otherwise. To gain unfair advantage, an adversary may bribe the server to launch various kinds of attacks - to convince that an invalid signature held by a client is a valid one (say for providing false information or repudiable commitment) or to claim that a valid signature is invalid (say for spoiling the offer provided by an opponent). However, these concerns are not properly captured by existing security models. In this paper, we provide a generic pairing-based SAV protocol. Compared with the protocol of Girault and Lefranc in Asiacrypt '05, ours provides a higher level of security yet applicable to a much wider class of pairing-based cryptosystems. In particular, it suggests SAV protocols for short signatures in the standard model and aggregate signatures which have not been studied before. Copyright 2011 ACM.