Deniable Ring Authentication

Digital Signatures enable authenticating messages in a way that disallows repudiation. While non-repudiation is essential in some applications, it might be undesirable in others. Two related notions of authentication are: Deniable Authentication (see Dwork, Naor and Sahai [25]) and Ring Signatures (see Rivest, Shamir and Tauman [38]). In this paper we show how to combine these notions and achieve Deniable Ring Authentication: it is possible to convince a verifier that a member of an ad hoc subset of participants (a ring) is authenticating a message m without revealing which one (source hiding), and the verifier V cannot convince a third party that message m was indeed authenticated – there is no ‘paper trail’ of the conversation, other than what could be produced by V alone, as in zero-knowledge. We provide an efficient protocol for deniable ring authentication based on any strong encryption scheme. That is once an entity has published a public-key of such an encryption system, it can be drafted to any such ring. There is no need for any other cryptographic primitive. The scheme can be extended to yield threshold authentication (e.g. at least k members of the ring are approving the message) as well.