Redactable signatures for independent removal of structure and content

Abstract

In this paper, we present a provably secure redactable signature scheme allowing to independently redact structure and content. We identify the problems when structure is not separated from content, resulting in an attack on the scheme proposed at VLDB '08 by Kundu and Bertino. The attack allows for changing the semantic meaning of a given tree. We introduce a rigid security model, including consecutive redaction control, to formalize the required behaviour of our scheme. Moreover, we present first performance evaluations of our implementation to demonstrate the practical use of the presented scheme. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.