An Improvement of the Ateniese's Verifiable Encryption Protocol

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Popescu, Constantin^;

Affiliations: Department of Mathematics, University of Oradea, Str. Armatei Romane 5, Oradea, Romania, e‐mail: cpopescu@uoradea.ro

Note: [] The author is presently at “Centre for Quantifiable Quality of Service in Communication Systems” (Q2S), NTNU, Trondheim, Norway. The centre is appointed Centre of Excellence by The Research Council of Norway. It is financed by the Research Council, NTNU and UNINETT, and supported by Telenor.

Abstract: Verifiable encryption is a primitive that can be used to build extremely efficient fair exchange protocols where the items exchanged represent digital signatures. Such protocols may be used to digitally sign contracts on the Internet. This paper presents an efficient protocol for verifiable encryption of digital signatures that improves the security and efficiency of the verifiable encryption scheme of Ateniese. Our protocol can be applied to group signatures, key escrow and publicly verifiable secret and signature sharing to prove the fairness.

Keywords: cryptographic protocols, verifiable encryption, security, digital signatures

Journal: Informatica, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 121-130, 2005