How to Leak a Secret: Theory and Applications of Ring Signatures

In this work we formalize the notion of a ring signature, which makes it possible to specify a set of possible signers without revealing which member actually produced the signature. Unlike group signatures, ring signatures have no group managers, no setup procedures, no revocation procedures, and no coordination: any user can choose any set of possible signers that includes himself, and sign any message by using his secret key and the others’ public keys, without getting their approval or assistance. Ring signatures provide an elegant way to leak authoritative secrets in an anonymous way, to sign casual email in a way that can only be verified by its intended recipient, and to solve other problems in multiparty computations. Our main contribution lies in the presentation of efficient constructions of ring signatures; the general concept itself (under different terminology) was first introduced by Cramer et al. [CDS94]. Our constructions of such signatures are unconditionally signer-ambiguous, secure in the random oracle model, and exceptionally efficient: adding each ring member increases the cost of signing or verifying by a single modular multiplication and a single symmetric encryption. We also describe a large number of extensions, modifications and applications of ring signatures which were published after the original version of this work (in Asiacrypt 2001).