This paper considers the problem of balancing traceability and anonymity in designated verifier signatures (DVS), which are a kind of group-oriented signatures. That is, we propose claimable designated verifier signatures (CDVS), where a signer is able to claim that he/she indeed created a signature later. Ordinal DVS does not provide any traceability, which could indicate too strong anonymity. Thus, adding claimability, which can be seen as a sort of traceability, moderates anonymity. We demonstrate two generic constructions of CDVS from (i) ring signatures, (non-ring) signatures, pseudorandom function, and commitment scheme, and (ii) claimable ring signatures (by Park and Sealfon, CRYPTO'19).

As one of privacy-enhancing authentications suitable for decentralized environments, ring signatures have intensively been researched. In ring signatures, each user can choose any ad-hoc set of users (specified by public keys) called a ring, and anonymously sign a message as one of the users. However, in applications of anonymous authentications, users may misbehave the service due to the anonymity, and thus a mechanism to exclude the anonymous misbehaving users is required. However, in the existing ring signature scheme, a trusted entity to open the identity of the user is needed, but it is not suitable for the decentralized environments. On the other hand, as another type of anonymous authentications, a decentralized blacklistable anonymous credential system is proposed, where anonymous misbehaving users can be detected and excluded by a blacklist. However, the DL-based instantiation needs O(N) proof size for the ring size N. In the research line of the DL-based ring signatures, an efficient scheme with O(log N) signature size, called DualRing, is proposed. In this paper, we propose a DL-based blacklistable ring signature scheme extended from DualRing, where in addition to the short O(log N) signature size for N, the blacklisting mechanism is realized to exclude misbehaving users. Since the blacklisting mechanism causes additional costs in our scheme, the signature size is O(log N+l), where l is the blacklist size.

Traceable ring signatures, proposed at PKC'07, are a variant of ring signatures, which allow a signer to anonymously sign a message with a tag behind a ring, i.e., a group of users chosen by the signer, unless he signs two messages with the same tag. However, if a signer signs twice on the same tag, the two signatures will be linked and the identity of the signer will be revealed when the two signed messages are different. Traceable ring signatures can be applied to anonymous write-in voting without any special voting authority and electronic coupon services. The previous traceable ring signature scheme relies on random oracles at its security and the signature size is linear in the number of ring members. This paper proposes the first secure traceable ring signature schemes without random oracles in the common reference string model. In addition, the proposed schemes have a signature size of O(), where N is the number of users in the ring.

In a linkable ring signature scheme, a signer himself selects a set of parties called a "ring" and signs the messages on behalf of the ring. Any party can know whether or not the ring signatures are made by the same signer, although the party cannot know the identity of the actual signer. Au, Liu, Susilo, and Yuen proposed an ID-based linkable ring signature scheme and an ID-based revocable-iff-linked ring signature scheme. With a revocable-iff-linked ring signature scheme, any party can recover the identity of the signer, if the signer makes two or more ring signatures. In this paper, we show that Au et al.'s revocable-iff-linked ring signature scheme does not provide anonymity, even if the signer makes only one ring signature. Anonymity is one of the most basic security requirements of ring signatures.

The ring signature allows a signer to leak secrets anonymously, without the risk of identity escrow. At the same time, the ring signature provides great flexibility: No group manager, no special setup, and the dynamics of group choice. The ring signature is, however, vulnerable to malicious or irresponsible signers in some applications, because of its anonymity. In this paper, we propose a traceable ring signature scheme. A traceable ring scheme is a ring signature except that it can restrict "excessive" anonymity. The traceable ring signature has a tag that consists of a list of ring members and an issue that refers to, for instance, a social affair or an election. A ring member can make any signed but anonymous opinion regarding the issue, but only once (per tag). If the member submits another signed opinion, possibly pretending to be another person who supports the first opinion, the identity of the member is immediately revealed. If the member submits the same opinion, for instance, voting "yes" regarding the same issue twice, everyone can see that these two are linked. The traceable ring signature can suit to many applications, such as an anonymous voting on a BBS. We formalize the security definitions for this primitive and show an efficient and simple construction in the random oracle model.

This paper studies the relations among several definitions of anonymity for ring signature schemes in the same attack environment. It is shown that one intuitive and two technical definitions we consider are asymptotically equivalent, and the indistinguishability-based technical definition is the strongest, i.e., the most secure when achieved, when the exact reduction cost is taken into account. We then extend our result to the threshold case where a subset of members cooperate to create a signature. The threshold setting makes the notion of anonymity more complex and yields a greater variety of definitions. We explore several notions and observe certain relation does not seem hold unlike the simple single-signer case. Nevertheless, we see that an indistinguishability-based definition is the most favorable in the threshold case. We also study the notion of linkability and present a simple scheme that achieves both anonymity and linkability.

Ring signature scheme enables a signer to sign a message anonymously. In the ring signature scheme, the signer who wants to sign a document anonymously first chooses some public keys of entities (signers) and then generates a signature which ensures that one of the signer or entities signs the document. In some situations, however, the ring signature scheme allows the signer to shift the blame to victims because of the anonymity. The group signature scheme may be a solution for the problem; however, it needs an electronic big brother, called a group manager, who can violate the signer anonymity by himself, and a complicated key setting. This paper introduces a new notion of a signature scheme with signer anonymity, a deniable ring signature scheme (DRS), in which no group manager exists, and the signer should be involved in opening the signer anonymity. We also propose a concrete scheme proven to be secure under the assumption of the DDH (decision Diffie Hellman) problem in the random oracle model.

This paper introduces the concept of "revocable unlinkability" for unlinkable anonymous signatures and proposes a generalized scheme that modifies the signatures to include revocable unlinkability. Revocable unlinkability provides a condition in which multiple messages signed using an unlinkable anonymous signature are unlinkable for anyone except the unlinkability revocation manager. Noteworthy is that the identifier of the signer is kept secret from the manager. In addition, examples are presented in which the proposed scheme is applied to existing group/ring signatures. The proposed scheme employs a verifiable MIX-net to shuffle the identifiers of all potential signers, thus giving it the potential for wide application to unlinkable anonymous signatures.

In this paper, we present previously unproposed schemes for encryption with anonymity and ring signature by applying two techniques. That is, we construct a key-privacy encryption scheme by using N-ary representation, and a ring signature scheme by using the repetition of evaluation of functions. We analyze precisely the properties of these schemes and show their advantage and disadvantage.

This paper presents an efficient and generic solution in the following scenario: There are n independent people using variety of signature schemes such as DSS, RSA, Schnorr, and so on, and a subset of them attempts to sign a document without being identified which subset they are. This is a generalized scenario of the Ring Signatures by Rivest, Shamir and Tauman, whose original scenario limits the subset to be a single person and the base signature scheme to be RSA/Rabin schemes. Our scheme allows any signature schemes based on sigma-protocols and claw-free permutations. It also offers shorter signatures and less computation compared to known generic construction. The security is argued in the random oracle model as well as previous schemes and shows that our scheme achieves reduction cost linear in the number of hash queries while it is square for previous generic constructions.

This paper addresses how to use public-keys of several different signature schemes to generate 1-out-of-n signatures. Previously known constructions are for either RSA-type keys only or DL-type keys only. We present a widely applicable method to construct a 1-out-of-n signature scheme that allows mixture use of different flavors of keys at the same time. The resulting scheme is more efficient than previous schemes even if it is used only with a single type of keys. With all DL-type keys, it yields shorter signatures than the ones of the previously known scheme based on the witness indistinguishable proofs by Cramer, et al. With all RSA-type keys, it reduces both computational and storage costs compared to that of the Ring signatures by Rivest, et al.