An Improvement of the Ateniese's Verifiable Encryption Protocol

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.