A study on dynamic group signature scheme with threshold traceability for blockchain

Abstract

Blockchain technology provides transparency and reliability by sharing transactions and maintaining the same information through consensus among all participants. However, single-signature applications in transactions can lead to user identification issues due to the reuse of public keys. To address this issue, group signatures can be used, where the same group public key is used to verify signatures from group members to provide anonymity to users. However, in dynamic groups where membership may change, an attack can occur where a user who has left the group can disguise themselves as a group member by leaking a partial key. This problem cannot be traced back to the partial key leaker. In this paper, we propose assigning different partial keys to group members to trace partial key leakers and partially alleviate the damage caused by partial key leaks. Exist schemes have shown that arbitrary tracing issues occurred when a single administrator had exclusive key generation and tracing authority. This paper proposes a group signature scheme that solves the synchronization problem by involving a threshold number of TMs while preventing arbitrary tracing by distributing authority among multiple TMs.

Keywords

Blockchain / Group signature / Privacy / Anonymity / Traceability

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Institute of Information & communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (RS-2022-00167197, Development of Intelligent 5G/6G Infrastructure Technology for The Smart City) and this work was funded by BK21 FOUR (Fostering Outstanding Universities for Research) (5199990914048) and this work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (2022R1A2B5B01002490) and the Soonchunhyang University Research Fund.

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