Abstract
In this paper, a novel linkable ring signature scheme is constructed. The hash value of the public key in the ring and the signer’s private key are based on random numbers. This setting makes it unnecessary to set the linkable label separately for our constructed scheme. When judging the linkability, it is necessary to determine whether the number of the intersections of the two sets reaches the threshold related to the number of the ring members. In addition, under the random oracle model, the unforgeability is reduced to the problem. The anonymity is proved based on the definition of statistical distance and its properties.
1. Introduction
In 2001, Rivest et al. [1] proposed the concept of ring signature. In a ring signature, the signer chooses several other users’ public keys to form a set with his own public key. In the signature verification phase, the verifier can confirm that the signature is generated by one of the ring members, but the verifier cannot find the real signer. There are many signature schemes that extend the original ring signature scheme to special scenarios, such as the deniable ring signature scheme in [2,3], the identity-based ring signature scheme in [4,5,6,7,8,9], and the linkable ring signature scheme in [10,11,12,13]. Linkable ring signature was a special ring signature proposed by Liu et al. [11]. Linkable ring signature is suitable for many practical scenarios, such as e-cash and e-voting. The general ring signature is not suitable for electronic voting because it is difficult to determine whether the same voter has voted more than once. Linkable ring signature can solve this problem, and the verifier can detect whether the generated votes are from the same voter through the linkable label. In 2021, Tang et al. [14] constructed an identity-based linkable ring signature scheme on NTRU lattice. In 2022, Ye et al. [15] constructed a linkable ring signature scheme on NTRU lattice. In [10,11,12,13,14,15], the linkability of the each signature scheme were determined by generating tags.
The signature schemes were based on the discrete logarithm in [1,11,13,16] and the bilinear pair in [17,18,19]. There are also parts of the literature that are based on lattices [3,14,20,21,22,23,24,25,26]. Lyubshvsky gave a signature scheme and a new hash function for calculating the difficulty problem based on ideal lattices in [27]. In [23], the first ring signature scheme was constructed by using the scheme [27]. In [3], a ring signature scheme with deniable property was constructed based on [3,27].
Based on [11,23,24], the output of the hash function of the public key in the ring and the signer’s private key are used to selecte random numbers. We give a new general structure of linkability, and construct a linkable ring signature scheme on ideal lattices (LRS).
Contributions
• Replace the random number in the signature algorithm in [23] with the hash value of the public key in the ring and the private key. Our signature scheme (LRS) and the scheme in [23] have the same length of the public key, the secret key and the signature output, but our LRS is linkable.
• In [10,11,12,13,14,15,25,26], the linkable criterion was that the linkability label was the same. Unlike this, in our scheme, the linkability criterion is to determine the maximum number of the elements in the intersection of the two sets rather than the number of the ring members.
2. Preliminaries
2.1. Notations
The notations is in Table 1.
Table 1.
Notations.
2.2. Hash Functions
Definition 1
([28]). For and , let be the function family such that for any , , where .
According to [28], for , and , then
Definition 2
([28] Collision Problem). For , and , the Collision Problem Col asks to find and such that .
Definition 3
([28]). For , monic polynomial and a lattice corresponding to an ideal in the ring , the problem asks to find such that , where is the length of the shortest nonzero vector on .
In Theorem 3.1 of the literature [27], if (where ), we can get the following theorem.
Theorem 1
([27]). Let be a ring (where ). Define the set . Let be a function family as in Definition 1 such that and . If there is a polynomial-time algorithm that can solve Col for random with some non-negligible probability, then there is a polynomial-time algorithm that can solve for every lattice corresponding to an ideal in , where .
2.3. Statistical Distance
Definition 4
([29]). Let X and be two random variables over a countable set S. The statistical distance between X and is defined by
3. Framework and Security Model of LRS Scheme
Our LRS consists five probabilistic polynomial time (PPT) algorithms.
- : Input the security parameter n, and output the public parameter .
- : Input , and output of a keypair .
- : Input , a singer’s , a message and the ring (), and output a signature .
- : Input the signature , and output “1” or “0”.
- : Input two valid signatures , and output “1” or “0”.
The LRS is correct that the verification algorithm outputs “1” for the valid signature and “0” for the invalid signature.
Security Properties
The LRS satisfies the unforgeabilityy, anonymit and linkability which is similar to [11,13,23].
Definition 5
(Unforgeability). The LRS is unforgeable if there is no PPT to win the following games with an advantage that cannot be ignored.
: calls LRS-SetUp to generate the parameters and calls LRS-KeyGen to generate the keypair , and sends the parameters and all public keys to .
: the adversary can perform polynomial Hash queries, Extract queries and Signature queries.
: the adversary submits , if the following conditions are true:
- (1)
- did not query the private key of ;
- (2)
- did not query ’s signature, then won the game.
The advantage is defined as .
Definition 6
(Anonymity). The LRS scheme is said to be anonymous if there is no PPT to win the following games with an advantage that cannot be ignored.
: calls LRS-SetUp to generate the parameters and calls LRS-KeyGen to generate the keypair , and sends and all public keys to .
: the performs a polynomially bounded number of Hash queries, Extract queries and Signature queries.
: selects and calls LRS-Sign (where , and μ are corresponding to the ring, the private key and the message respectively) to generate the signature . did not query ’s signature.
: outputs as a guess of b. If , then wins the game.
The advantage is defined as .
Definition 7
(Linkability). LRS scheme is said to be linkable if for PPT to win the following games with an advantage that cannot be ignored.
: calls LRS-SetUp to generate the parameters and calls LRS-KeyGen to generate teh keypair , and sends and all public keys to .
: the performs a polynomially bounded number of Hash queries, Extract queries and Signature queries.
: selects and calls LRS-Sign (where , and μ are corresponding to the ring, the private key and the message respectively) to generate the signature . did not query ’s signature.
: outputs bit as a guess of b. If and , then wins the game.
The advantage is defined as .
4. Construction of Our LRS
The LRS consists of five PPT algorithms: ParamGen, KeyGen, Sign, Verify and Link. The parameter settings are as follows:
D: .
: .
: .
G: .
H: .
: .
: .
: a family of hash function: .
4.1. LRS-Setup
Step 1. Pick .
Step 2. Pick , where and . Let .
Step 3. Pick p as a prime and , .
Step 4. Pick .
Step 5. Output .
4.2. LRS-KeyGen
Step 1. Pick .
Step 2. Compute .
Step 3. Output .
4.3. LRS-Sign
Input a message , a ring , a private key associated to the public key , and do the following:
Step 1. For , compute .
Step 2. For , compute .
Step 3. Compute .
Step 4. Compute .
Step 5. Compute
Step 6. For , compute . If does not hold, then go back to reselect public keys.
Step 7. For , .
Step 8. Output .
4.4. LRS-Verify
Input the message , the ring , the signature , and check the following steps:
Step 1. Compute
Step 2. If , then output “1”, otherwise output “0”.
4.5. LRS-Link
Input two valid signatures , and do the following:
Step 1. If holds, then output “0”.
Step 2. Otherwise, output “1”.
4.6. LRS-Correctness
- 1.
- From Corollary 6.2 of [27], we obtain that the probability of is approximately ;
- 2.
- We need to show . Since , we have .
4.7. Construction of Our RS
By changing the first and second steps of the LRS-Sign, the following ring signature scheme (RS) can be obtained.
The parameter setting is the same as LRS
• RS-Setup
This part is the same as LRS-Setup.
• RS-KeyGen
This part is the same as LRS-KeyGen.
• RS-Sign
Input , a ring , a private key associated to , and do the following:
Step 1. For , picks .
Step 2. For , pick .
Step 3. Compute .
Step 4. Compute .
Step 5. Compute
Step 6. For , compute . If does not hold, then go back to reselect public keys.
Step 7. For ,
Step 8. Output .
•RS-Vrify
This part is the same as LRS-Vrify.
5. Security Analysis
We will prove that our LRS satisfies unforgeability, anonymity and linkability.
Theorem 2
(Unforgeability). If there is a PPT algorithm which can forge the LRS signature with probabilistic ϵ at most q times random oracle H. Then for , there is a PPT algorithm that outputs a solution to with probability at least
Proof of Theorem 2.
gives an , picks a secret key and computes the public key .
creates two empty lists to record the queries of adversary .
: Executing the LRS-Setup, gives the parameters .
: For the ring , where , performs the following operations:
Hash query:
- 1.
- sends message to . For , picks and . queries and returns the same record if there is already the query;
- 2.
- Otherwise, picks and passes to . recordsto .
Extract query:
- 1.
- queries first. If has already been queried, returns ;
- 2.
- Otherwise, picks , and passes to . records to .
Sign query:
sends message , the ring , where . operates as follows:
- 1.
- checks . If does not exist, go to Hash query and record in .
- 2.
- checks . If does not exist, go to Extract query and record in .
- 3.
- checks and . seeks the record in and the record in ;
- 4.
- Let , , returns the signature .
Forgery:
sends a message , the ring
and forges signature by the real signer to , the following hold:
- 1.
- has not inquired the private key of the public key ;
- 2.
- has not inquired ’s signature.
Suppose the signature is legal signature of message and . first queries to find and queries to find . If is not in , the game ends. Otherwise, since can pass the verification, we obtain
answers ’s query again and answers all queries consistently except Hash returned by the query. By Lemma 3.1 in [30], produces another forged signature , we obtain
extracts the secret key of , and lets (if ), . It is easy to see that can pass the verification, so
continues the calculation. Let (if ), . We will obtain can pass the verification, so
Since , we obtain , so .
Since , , so the product is in the ring , it also must be in the ring . Because is irreducible over the integers, is an integral domain, therefore either or . Since and , so
Thus the problem was solved.
Suppose the probability that can successfully solve is .
When is not in , the probability that passing the LRS-verify is .
From the above analysis, we can see that
From Theorem 1, we obtain that is based on solving (where for every lattice corresponding to an ideal . □
Theorem 3
(Anonymity). For , are the outputs of the algorithm LRS-Sign , where , and μ are corresponding to the ring, the private key and the message respectively. For any PPT adversary, when and are unknown, then
Therefore, LRS is anonymous.
Proof of Theorem 3.
: This part is the same as in Theorem 2.
: This part is the same as Theorem 2.
: selects the message , keypair , the ring and , then randomly selects and calls LRS-Sign to generate the signature .
: outputs .
Suppose the signature with private key outputs
the signature with private key outputs
The following only need to prove that and are statistically indistinguishable.
From Proposition 8.9, 8.10 of [29] and trigonometric inequality, we can get
□
Theorem 4
(Linkability). If H is collision resistant and the number of ring members is not less than three, then the LRS signature scheme is linkable.
Proof of Theorem 4.
: This part is the same as in Theorem 2.
: This part is the same as Theorem 2.
:
- 1.
- hands a message and uses the LRS-KeyGen to generate key pair
- 2.
- picks the ring and . calls LRS-Sign to generate the signatures and .
- 3.
- picks , then reselects and uses the ring to call the LRS-KeyGen to generate the signature . sends to .
: outputs bit .
decides which of
and
holds. If the first is true, output , if the second is true, output .
Next, we will discuss it in two ways.
- 1.
- When , because the ring is the same and the calculated is the same, there is at most one output of the signature output which is different from the real signer’s subscript, so there are identical at least . That is, when the signature is signed by the same private key for different messages, it can be completely determined.
- 2.
- when , because the ring is the same and H is strong anti-collision, when calculating , the probability that the hash values and are equal can be negligible. Therefore, only one probability is negligible at most with the same output value as the real signer subscript.
Since there are at least three ring members and at least two ’s are not the same, when the signature is not the same signer, it can be determined with overwhelming probability.
□
6. Efficiency Analysis
In Table 2, we set and l is the number of ring members. From Table 2, we may conclude that the public key, secret key and signature sizes of our scheme are equal to the scheme in [23], the size of the signature is smaller than the scheme in [3], and the size of the signature is larger than the scheme in [15].
Table 2.
Communication overhead comparison (in bits).
In Table 3, m is the number of components of a polynomial vector and l is the number of ring members. When calculating the time complexity, some lightweight operations (hash function and random number selecting) are not taken into account. It mainly calculates the time cost of polynomial multiplication () and polynomial inversion (). The runtime of the discrete Gaussian sampling algorithm, the rejection sampling algorithm, the trapdoor generation algorithm and the SamplePre algorithm [15] are represented by , , and , respectively. In [15], , , and are used for keypair and the signature. From Table 3, we may conclude that the signature cost and the verification cost in our scheme are smaller than the scheme in [3], and the keypair cost is smaller than the scheme in [3,23].
Table 3.
Comparison of time costs.
Table 4 shows the comparison of our signature scheme with the other four schemes in terms of their functionality. The deniable ring signature can prove that the ring member has not signed the signature when necessary. The linkable ring signature can determine whether two signatures are those of the same signer in the ring member. Both the deniable ring signature and the linkable ring signature are ring signatures with special properties, which can be applied to special real situations. From Table 4, we may conclude that LRS and YQ [15] are linkable and secure in case of a quantum attack.
Table 4.
Comparison of functionality.
7. Conclusions
In this paper, the LRS is constructed based on the problem. In LRS, the linkable label is embedded into the randomly selected vector of the signature process in the constructed signature scheme in [23], which means that although the signature output form of our scheme is the same as in the scheme in [23], our scheme is linkable. In the future, we hope to construct a linkable and deniable ring signature scheme.
Author Contributions
Writing, editing, original draft, methodology and formal analysis, C.C.; Reviewing, revising and innovative ideas, L.Y.; Reviewing, editing and formal analysis, G.H. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding
This research is partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.61772166) and the Key Program of the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province of China (No. LZ17F020002).
Institutional Review Board Statement
Not applicable.
Informed Consent Statement
Not applicable.
Data Availability Statement
Not applicable.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
References
- Rivest, R.L.; Shamir, A. How to leak a secret. In Proceedings of the International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security; Springer: Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany, 2001; pp. 552–565. [Google Scholar]
- Komano, Y.; Ohta, K.; Shimbo, A.; Kawamura, S.I. Toward the fair anonymous signatures: Deniable ring signatures. In Proceedings of the Cryptographers’ Track at the RSA Conference; Springer: Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany, 2006; pp. 174–191. [Google Scholar]
- Gao, W.; Chen, L.; Hu, Y.; Newton, C.J.; Wang, B.; Chen, J. Lattice-based deniable ring signatures. Int. J. Inf. Secur. 2019, 18, 355–370. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Zhang, F.; Kim, K. Efficient id-based blind signature and proxy signature from bilinear pairings. In Proceedings of the Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy; Springer: Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany, 2003; pp. 312–323. [Google Scholar]
- Herranz, J.; Sáez, G. New identity-based ring signature schemes. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Information and Communications Security; Springer: Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany, 2004; pp. 27–39. [Google Scholar]
- Xu, F.; Lv, X. A new identity-based threshold ring signature scheme. In Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Anchorage, AK, USA, 9–12 October 2011; pp. 2646–2651. [Google Scholar]
- Deng, L.; Zeng, J. Two new identity-based threshold ring signature schemes. Theor. Comput. Sci. 2014, 535, 38–45. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Jia, X.; He, D.; Xu, Z.; Liu, Q. An efficient identity-based ring signature over a lattice (in chinese). J. Cryptologic Res. 2017, 4, 392–404. [Google Scholar]
- Deng, L.; Jiang, Y.; Ning, B. Identity-based linkable ring signature scheme. IEEE Access 2019, 7, 153969–153976. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- El Kaafarani, A.; Chen, L.; Ghadafi, E.; Davenport, J. Attributebased signatures with user-controlled linkability. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Cryptology and Network Security; Springer: Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany, 2014; pp. 256–259. [Google Scholar]
- Liu, J.K.; Wei, V.K.; Wong, D.S. Linkable spontaneous anonymous group signature for ad hoc groups. In Proceedings of the Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy; Springer: Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany, 2004; pp. 325–335. [Google Scholar]
- Au, M.H.; Chow, S.S.; Susilo, W.; Tsang, P.P. Short linkable ring signatures revisited. In Proceedings of the European Public Key Infrastructure Workshop; Springer: Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany, 2006; pp. 101–115. [Google Scholar]
- Noether, S.; Mackenzie, A. Ring confidential transactions. Ledger 2016, 1, 1–18. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Tang, Y.; Xia, F.; Ye, Q.; Wang, M.; Mu, R.; Zhang, X. Identity-based Linkable Ring Signature on NTRU Lattice. Secur. Commun. Netw. 2021, 2021, 9992414. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Ye, Q.; Wang, M.; Meng, H. Efficient Linkable Ring Signature Scheme over NTRU Lattice with Unconditional Anonymity. Comput. Intell. Neurosci. 2022, 2022, 8431874. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
- Herranz, J.; Sáez, G. Forking lemmas for ring signature schemes. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Cryptology in India; Springer: Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany, 2003; pp. 266–279. [Google Scholar]
- Shacham, H.; Waters, B. Efficient ring signatures without random oracles. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Public Key Cryptography; Springer: Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany, 2007; pp. 166–180. [Google Scholar]
- Zhang, F.; Safavi-Naini, R.; Susilo, W. An efficient signature scheme from bilinear pairings and its applications. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Public Key Cryptography; Springer: Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany, 2004; pp. 277–290. [Google Scholar]
- Islam, S.K.H.; Das, A.K.; Khan, M.K. Design of a provably secure identity-based digital multi-signature scheme using biometrics and fuzzy extractor. Secur. Commun. Netw. 2016, 9, 3229–3238. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Gentry, C.; Peikert, C.; Vaikuntanathan, V. Trapdoors for hard lattices and new cryptographic constructions. In Proceedings of the Fortieth Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing; Association for Computing Machinery: New York, NY, USA, 2008; pp. 197–206. [Google Scholar]
- Kawachi, A.; Tanaka, K.; Xagawa, K. Concurrently secure identification schemes based on the worst-case hardness of lattice problems. In Proceedings of the International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security; Springer: Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany, 2004; pp. 372–389. [Google Scholar]
- Cayrel, P.L.; Lindner, R.; Ru¨ckert, M.; Silva, R. A lattice-based threshold ring signature scheme. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Cryptology and Information Security in Latin America; Springer: Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany, 2010; pp. 255–272. [Google Scholar]
- Melchor, C.A.; Bettaieb, S.; Boyen, X.; Fousse, L. Adapting lyubashevsky’s signature schemes to the ring signature setting. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Cryptology in Africa; Springer: Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany, 2013; pp. 1–25. [Google Scholar]
- Lyubashevsky, V. Fiat-shamir with aborts: Applications to lattice and factoring-based signatures. In Proceedings of the International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security; Springer: Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany, 2009; pp. 598–616. [Google Scholar]
- Torres, W.A.A.; Steinfeld, R.; Sakzad, A.; Liu, J.K. Post-quantum onetime linkable ring signature and application to ring confidential transactions in blockchain (lattice ringct v1.0). In Proceedings of the Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy; Springer: Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany, 2018; pp. 558–576. [Google Scholar]
- Baum, C.; Lin, H.; Oechsner, S. Towards practical lattice-based one-time linkable ring signatures. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Information and Communications Security; Springer: Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany, 2018; pp. 303–322. [Google Scholar]
- Lyubashevsky, V. Towards Practical Lattice-Based Cryptography. Ph.D. Thesis, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA, 2008. [Google Scholar]
- Lyubashevsky, V.; Micciancio, D. Generalized compact knapsacks are collision resistant. In Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming; Springer: Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany, 2006; pp. 144–155. [Google Scholar]
- Micciancio, D.; Goldwasser, S. Complexity of Lattice Problems: A Cryptographic Perspective; The Kluwer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science; Springer: Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany, 2002; Volume 671. [Google Scholar]
- Bellare, M.; Neven, G. Multi-signatures in the plain public-key model and a general forking lemma. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Association for Computing Machinery; Association for Computing Machinery: New York, NY, USA, 2006; pp. 390–399. [Google Scholar]
Disclaimer/Publisher’s Note: The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of MDPI and/or the editor(s). MDPI and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content. |
© 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).