Towards Practical Attribute-Based Signatures

An attribute-based signature (ABS) is a special digital signature created using a dynamic set of issued attributes. For instance, a doctor can sign a medical statement with his name, medical license number and medical speciality. These attributes can be verified along with the signature by any verifier with the correct public keys of the respective attribute issuers. This functionality not only makes ABS a much more flexible alternative to the standard PKI-based signatures, but also offers the ability to create privacy-preserving signatures. However, none of the ABS constructions presented in the literature is practical or easily realizable. In fact, to the best of our knowledge, there is currently no ABS implementation used in practice anywhere. This is why we put forward a new ABS technique based on the IRMA attribute-based authentication. IRMA already has an efficient and practical smart-card implementation, and an experimental smart-phone implementation too. They are currently used in several pilot projects. In this paper, we propose an ABS scheme based on the existing IRMA technology, extending the currently available IRMA devices with ABS functionality. We study the practical issues that arise due to the introduction of the signature functionality to an existing attribute-based authentication scheme, and we propose possible cryptographic and infrastructural solutions. We also discuss use cases and implementation aspects.