Digital signatures out of second-preimage resistant hash functions

Abstract

We propose a new construction for Merkle authentication trees which does not require collision resistant hash functions; in contrast with previous constructions that attempted to avoid the dependency on collision resistance, our technique enjoys provable security assuming the well-understood notion of second-preimage resistance. The resulting signature scheme is existentially unforgeable when the underlying hash function is second-preimage resistant, yields shorter signatures, and is affected neither by birthday attacks nor by the recent progresses in collision-finding algorithms. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.