On Signatures and Authentication

The design of cryptographic protocols using trapdoor and one-way functions has received considerable attention in the past few years [1–8]. More recently, attention has been paid to provide rigorous correctness proofs based on simple mathematical assumptions, for example, in coin flipping (Blum [1]), mental poker (Goldwasser and Micali [4]). It is perhaps reasonable to speculate at this time that all cryptographic protocols can eventually be designed to be provably secure under simple assumptions, such as factoring large numbers or inverting RSA functions are computationally intractable in the appropriate sense.