A trusted group signature architecture in virtual computing environment

Abstract

Nowadays coordinated applications become more and more popular in network computing environments, and group is the basic unit of task processing for such applications. Members in a group exchange data with each other. Group signature is used to guarantee the integrity of exchanged data and provide source authentication. In a Virtual Machine (VM) based computing system, a Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) allows multiple applications to run in different virtual machines, and each virtual machine runs in its own hardware protection domain, and is strongly isolated from each other. A Trusted VMM can provide stronger security protection to build group signature architecture than traditional computing platforms. In this paper, we first introduce a trusted group signature architecture in virtual computing environment and how the Trusted VMM (TVMM) provides security guarantee for group signature components. Then we propose a group signature scheme with the function of message checking based on the discrete logarithm problem (DLP). Finally, we prove the security of the group signature scheme and architecture. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.