Abstract
Hash-based one-time signatures are becoming increasingly important as they are post-quantum safe and have been used in multi-cast communication and other applications. However, managing the state of such signatures can present a significant challenge, as signers are typically responsible for ensuring that the state cannot be reused. Recently, blockchain, as a public platform, is used to design revocation management and status verification systems. While blockchain revocation is attractive, many well-known blockchains make use of ECDSA as their underlying signature scheme, and this is not post-quantum safe. Researchers have been working on replacing ECDSA with post-quantum signature schemes but they are much more costly. In this paper, we introduce a new one-time signature scheme, called Blockchain-Aided Hash-based Signature (BAHS), in which a hash-based commitment scheme acts as the building block, and signers’ commitments and opened commitments are publicly accessible via a distributed blockchain. A signature is formed from the commitment/opened commitment and blockchain. Unlike existing blockchain systems, the commitment in BAHS is simpler than that in most existing hash-based one-time signature schemes or other post-quantum signature schemes. We provide a formal security model for the BAHS scheme and give the security proof. Finally, we have implemented our BAHS scheme and the result shows its practicality.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the European Union’s Horizon research and innovation program for support under grant agreement numbers: 101069688 (CONNECT), 101070627 (REWIRE), 952697 (ASSURED), 101019645 (SECANT) and 101095634 (ENTRUST). These projects are funded by the UK government’s Horizon Europe guarantee and administered by UKRI. The first author thanks the China Scholarship Council (CSC) for providing the research scholarship. We also thank the anonymous reviewers from ISPEC for their valuable comments.
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A Oracles for the Unforgeability
Oracles for the unforgeability
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Wang, Y., Chen, L., Meng, L., Tian, Y. (2023). BAHS: A Blockchain-Aided Hash-Based Signature Scheme. In: Meng, W., Yan, Z., Piuri, V. (eds) Information Security Practice and Experience. ISPEC 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14341. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7032-2_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7032-2_25
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