An Efficient Signature Scheme from Bilinear Pairings and Its Applications

In Asiacrypt2001, Boneh, Lynn, and Shacham [8] proposed a short signature scheme (BLS scheme) using bilinear pairing on certain elliptic and hyperelliptic curves. Subsequently numerous cryptographic schemes based on BLS signature scheme were proposed. BLS short signature needs a special hash function [6, 1, 8]. This hash function is probabilistic and generally inefficient. In this paper, we propose a new short signature scheme from the bilinear pairings that unlike BLS, uses general cryptographic hash functions such as SHA-1 or MD5, and does not require special hash functions. Furthermore, the scheme requires less pairing operations than BLS scheme and so is more efficient than BLS scheme. We use this signature scheme to construct a ring signature scheme and a new method for delegation. We give the security proofs for the new signature scheme and the ring signature scheme in the random oracle model.