Limited verifier signature from bilinear pairings

Abstract

Motivated by the conflict between authenticity and privacy in the digital signature, the notion of limited verifier signature was introduced [1]. The signature can be verified by a limited verifier, who will try to preserve the privacy of the signer if the signer follows some specified rules. Also, the limited verifier can provide a proof to convince a judge that the signer has indeed generated the signature if he violated the predetermined rule. However, the judge cannot transfer this proof to convince any other party. Also, the limited verifier signature should be converted into an ordinary one for public verification if required. In this paper, we first present the precise definition and clear security notions for (convertible) limited verifier signature, and then propose two efficient (convertible) limited verifier signature schemes from bilinear pairings. Our schemes were proved to achieve the desired security notions under the random oracle model.