The ring authenticated encryption scheme - How to provide a clue wisely

Though cryptography is being used more and more widely in reality, it seems that there exists no scheme or a concatenation of some existing schemes that could deal soundly with such practical situations as providing a clue, where the provider of the clue may want to reserve his beneficial rights while keeping his identity secret. To address this problem, inspired by the two notions of the ring signature and the authenticated encryption signature, we propose a new type of authenticated encryption scheme, which we call the ring authenticated encryption scheme, which can enable any member of a group of persons to provide a clue to some designated recipient wisely. 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.