An Anonymous Designated Verifier Signature Scheme with Revocation: How to Protect a Company's Reputation

There are many cryptographic schemes with anonymity, such as group signatures. As one important property, anonymity revocation has been introduced. In such schemes, the fact of whether a signer’s rights have been revoked or not is important additional information. For example, if a third party knows that there are many revoked members in a company, then the company’s reputation may be damaged in many ways. People may think that there might be many problematic employees (who have bad behavior-s) in this company, there might be many people who have quit, i.e., the labor environment may not be good, and so on. To avoid such harmful rumors, in this paper, we propose an Anonymous Designated Verifier Signature (ADVS) scheme with revocation. In ADVS, a designated verifier can only verify a signature anonymously, and a third party cannot identify whether the rights of the signer have been revoked or not. We show two security-enhanced schemes as applications of our scheme: a biometric-based remote authentication scheme, and an identity management scheme.