Improved Online/Offline Signature Schemes

The notion of on-line/off-line signature schemes was introduced in 1990 by Even, Goldreich and Micali. They presented a general method for converting any signature scheme into an on-line/off-line signature scheme, but their method is not very practical as it increases the length of each signature by a quadratic factor. In this paper we use the recently introduced notion of a trapdoor hash function to develop a new paradigm called hash-sign-switch, which can convert any signature scheme into a highly efficient on-line/off-line signature scheme: In its recommended implementation, the on-line complexity is equivalent to about 0.1 modular multiplications, and the size of each signature increases only by a factor of two. In addition, the new paradigm enhances the security of the original signature scheme since it is only used to sign random strings chosen off-line by the signer. This makes the converted scheme secure against adaptive chosen message attacks even if the original scheme is secure only against generic chosen message attacks or against random message attacks.