Efficient group signature schemes for large groups

Abstract

A group signature scheme allows members of a group to sign messages on the group's behalf such that the resulting signature does not reveal their identity. Only a designated group manager is able to identify the group member who issued a given signature. Previously proposed realizations of group signature schemes have the undesirable property that the length of the public key is linear in the size of the group. In this paper we propose the first group signature scheme whose public key and signatures have length independent of the number of group members and which can therefore also be used for large groups. Furthermore, the scheme allows the group manager to add new members to the group without modifying the public key. The realization is based on methods for proving the knowledge of signatures.